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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ' 



SERMONS 



BY 



THE REV. PHIL. P. NEELY, 

Late of the Alabama Conference. 



With an introduction by Bishop H. N. McTyeire, and a Biographical 
Note by Rev. Dr. J. B. McFerrin. 




NASHVILLE, TENN.: 
SOUTHERN METHODIST PUBLISHING HOUSE. 

1884. 






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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by 

J. ALICE NEELY, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PREFACE. 

The sermons this volume contains were not written with a 
view to publication ; on the contrary, it was an expressed 
desire of my husband that they should not be published un- 
less it became a dire necessity; and such it now is. I give 
them to the public just as they were left in manuscript form, 
without any changes such as he might and doubtless would 
have made had they been prepared by his own hands for the 
press. The sermons have been carefully and kindly selected 
by wise heads and loving hearts. I would say just here that 
it was impossible to publish several sermons called for, inas- 
much as they were simply made out in skeleton form and 
filled up extemporaneously. 

I may be pardoned if, through this public medium, I thank 
our beloved Bishops and ministers of various Conferences for 
the many kind and encouraging words spoken in behalf of 
my book, during the months of unremitting toil I gave to the 
work preparatory to its completion. What an impetus words 
of cheer and kindness give us as we journey through life ! 

Those who have listened to the writer of these sermons 
will, in reading, miss the tender, gentle voice, the magnetic 
eye, the graceful gestures, and the wonderful spell of in- 
tense admiration and sympathy felt by all who heard him ; 
but I feel that although the brain that conceived them and 
the hands that penned them have been stilled in death for 
long years, they will meet with a warm welcome and a ten- 
der greeting from many who loved him. 

J. Alice Neelt. 



1> 2 3 i c a t i o n . 



BISHOPS, MINISTERS, AND FRIENDS 

WHO SO GENEROUSLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE 
PUBLICATION OF THIS VOLUME, 

I GRATEFULLY DEDICATE ITS PAGES. 

J. Alice Neely. 



INTRODUCTION. 



It is a good sign of the times when books of ser- 
mons are sought after and read. Such appreciation 
does not diminish the hearing of sermons, nor their 
careful preparation ; but rather it increases both. 

Many souls have been awakened, and more have 
been edified, by printed discourses setting forth di- 
vine truth in a hortatory or expository manner. If 
we pray for the preacher going into the pulpit with 
the living word upon his lips, we may also pray for 
him as he goes forth, in the form of book or pam- 
phlet, into the world that needs every ray of light 
and every influence for good that can be thrown 
upon it. 

The reader's expectation of receiving benefit from 
the following sermons might reasonably be strength- 
ened by the reflection that God had honored the 
author of them, oftentimes and in many places, by 
making him the messenger of comfort and of salva- 
tion to others; and though the eloquent tongue be 
still and the graceful personage be absent, the sub- 
stance of truth remains. Those who had heard 
Whitefield could never read the skeletons and re- 
ports of his sermons with any pleasure — they fell so 
far below the original delivery. Yet, even in that 
form, they did effective service — service that well 
repaid their publication. These sermons of the 



6 Introduction. 

Rev. Dr. Neely, however, have the advantage of hav- 
ing been written out by his own hand ; and there are 
many passages which those who enjoyed the happi- 
ness of knowing and hearing him can make very 
vivid by calling up the look, the manner, and the 
tone of voice in which they were spoken. 

May the godly sorrow and the gracious purpose 
of leading a new life, the increase of faith and hope, 
the consecration and the comfort which so often 
blessed his hearers, be the portion of his readers 
also! H. N. McTyeirb. 

V. U., June 30, 1884. 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 



The author of the following sermons was re- 
spectably connected. His father, Maj. Neely, was 
a gentleman of excellent standing, and his mother 
belonged to one of the best families in the West. 
He bore the name of both branches of the house — 
Philip Phillips Neely. He was born in Rutherford 
county, Tennessee, Sept. 9, 1819; converted Sept. 
9, 1839; admitted on trial in the Tennessee Confer- 
ence Sept. 9, 1840; and died in the city of Mobile, 
Alabama, Nov. 9, 1868. The ninth day of the 
month and the ninth month in the year seemed 
to be eventful periods in his history. His first ap- 
pointment was Jackson Circuit, in West Tennessee. 
In the organization of the Memphis Conference he 
fell into that division, and was stationed at Holly 
Springs, Mississippi. In 1841 he was transferred 
to the Tennessee Conference, and for two years 
filled the Huntsville Station. For awhile he was 
President of the Columbia (Tennessee) Female Col- 
lege, and for two years traveled as agent for Tran- 
sylvania University, of Kentucky. Afterward he 
was stationed at the McKendree Church, Nashville, 
and in 1848 was transferred to the Alabama Con- 
ference. Here for twenty years he filled most of 
the important stations in the Conference, and trav- 
eled some of its large districts as presiding elder. 



8 Biographical Note. 

He was always popular, and very successful as 
preacher and pastor. He possessed extraordinary 
gifts as a pulpit orator, and attracted crowds to hear 
him dispense the word of life. He represented his 
Annual Conference in the General Conference of 
1866, the last he ever attended. 

In person Dr. Neely was above medium size, 
very erect, and well formed. His complexion was 
fair, his eyes blue, and his face indicated intelligence 
and great kindness. His manner was attractive, 
and his voice had peculiar sweetness aud wonderful 
compass. Altogether he had but few equals as a 
preacher. He was sound in his doctrinal views, and 
was a thorough Methodist. This second volume of 
his sermons will be read with pleasure and profit. 
His last illness was brief, continuing about one 
week. His sufferings were severe, but his victory 
complete. With these words quivering on his lips, 
"Tell my brethren I die in the faith and in the love of 
my Church" he fell asleep in Jesus. Though dead 
he yet speaketh. J. B. McFerrin. 

Nashville, June 30, 1884. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

What is the Almighty?.. 11 

Holiness and Usefulness 28 

Making Void the Law of G-od 44 

Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany 60 

The Need of Eeligion 78 

The Bible as a Book of History 95 

The Bible as a Book of Philosophy Ill 

The Bible as a Book of Poetry 127 

Providence 142 

Forbidding Children to Come to Christ 159 

Diversity and Contentment in Labor 178 

The Greatness and Value of Man 195 

The Philosophy of Life , 211 

David's Despondency and Comfort 235 

A Happy Old Age 247 

The Final Deliverance 262 

Life Spent as a Tale that is Told 290 

Masonic Address 301 



PHIL P. NEELY'S SERMONS, 



What is the Almighty? 

" What is .the Almighty, that we should serve him ? " 
Job xxi. 15. 

THIS is a question which an infidel is supposed 
to ask of a man who believes in God's existence 
but not in his providence. There are many who be- 
lieve in God, but they deny both his general and 
particular providence. They believe in his great- 
ness, his majesty — in all that constitutes his sov- 
ereignty ; but they contend that his very great- 
ness proves that he does not concern himself with 
so insignificant an appendage of his empire as this 
planet, much less busy himself with the interests of 
its short-lived dwellers. There are multitudes of 
Christian men who believe this. They reduce the 
universe to essential orphanage by depriving it of 
all the practical benefits which the opposite belief 
secures to it by virtue of the greatness of its Author. 
I will not say that the absorption of the modern 
mind in scientific studies with a view to the pro- 
duction of great material results is entirely respon- 
sible for this falling off from the faith as it is in 
Jesus, but I will say that its tendency, joined to the 



12 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

natural gravitation of our appetites and passions, 
has had the decisive power to sink us all more or 
less in the darkness of this unbelief. It is not only 
a species of infidelity itself, but it furnishes food for 
the worst possible forms of infidelity, and even of 
atheism. To say, for instance, that there is a 
sovereign God who created all things, and yet to 
deny that he cares for and watches over what he has 
made, may well justify atheism to taunt us with the 
question, " What is the Almighty, that we should 
serve him?" This taunt was the result of the sad 
misinterpretation and the sadder misapplication of 
the doctrine of God's providence which the miser- 
able comforters of Job made when they came to con- 
sole him in his troubles. They contended that the 
great God had placed all things under the control 
of laws which would by necessity work out certain 
legitimate results; that by virtue of these ordi- 
nations, wickedness would be followed by sorrow 
and trouble, while righteousness would bring ex- 
emption ; and that therefore the sufferings of Job 
furnished unmistakable proof that he was a hypo- 
crite. In reply to their infidel reasonings, Job asks, 
" Wherefore do the wicked live — become old — yea, 
are mighty in power? " As if he had said: " While 
it is true that great wickedness is sometimes followed 
by remarkable punishments, it is also true that, in 
the providence of God, the notoriously wicked are 
often permitted to live and prosper, to grow old and 
become mighty; so that if your doctrine of fixed laws 
and penalties beyond even the control of God, the 
Maker and Legislator, be true, the hardened atheist 



What is the Almighty? 13 

who ignores his existence altogether may well ask 
you, 4 What is the Almighty, that we should serve 
him?' They may well mock you by asking: 'What is 
he but an abstraction, without either the disposition 
or the power to help us ? What, therefore, is such an 
Almighty, that we should either love or serve him? '" 

Now, it is just in this way that the infidelity of the 
Church has always fed, and is still feeding, the infi- 
delity of the world. We do not understand the re- 
lations of God to his creatures, because we will not 
take time to study them. This want of knowledge 
feeds the natural unbelief of our minds, so that we 
soon have scarcely any deep and well-grounded con- 
victions at all; and this want of faith reflects back 
upon our children and upon our intimate friends, 
until they lose faith in God, in religion, in immor- 
tality, and in the eternal awards of the future. 

There are thousands in the fold of Christ to-day 
who hold the same opinions of God and his provi- 
dence that Job's friends held. They acknowledge 
his greatness, and contend that because he is a great 
Sovereign, with a whole universe under the regula- 
tion of laws appointed by him for its government, 
he neither will nor can take a personal interest in 
any individual life. In this faith, or rather in this 
half faith, they talk to their children and friends, and 
beg them to enter upon the service of this God ; but 
their children and friends think, if they do not ask 
"What is your great Sovereign, your God, who has 
forced us oft" from his care by laws which he can 
never pass to minister to our wants, no matter how 
troubled we are, nor how sobbingly we may beg 



14 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

him to come and help us? What is such an Al- 
mighty, that we should give up the freedom of 
nature and enter upon his service ? " 

My purpose will be to try, by God's blessing, to 
show that the greatness of God, instead of furnishing 
an argument against his momentary watchfulness 
over each human life, is the very basis on which an 
enlightened faith expects and claims that watchful- 
ness ; and that therefore the commanding reason 
why you should serve him is found in the fact that 
this Almighty Sovereign does minister to your daily 
wants, and is momentarily engaged in seeking, in 
his own way and according to his own plans, your 
individual happiness. if I can only make these 
things as plain to your minds as they are to mine, 
may I not hope that instead of asking," What is the 
Almighty, that we should serve him ? " you will 
voluntarily, and under the impulsions of the purest 
and most grateful love, enter upon the service of 
one who, although an Almighty Being, is constantly 
laying that almightiness out for the good of his whole 
human family ? In this hope I shall address you. 

Let us see now if we can get at the founda- 
tion of these objections to the providence of God; 
for it is only by exposing the fallacy of this foun- 
dation that we can hope to refute the objections. 
The objections themselves are based on the assump- 
tion that it is incompatible with God's greatness for 
him to take any direct interest in what is going on 
in this contracted work of his universe, or for him 
to be occupied with the individual welfare of its 
population, and that as the Almighty Sovereign he 



What is the Almighty ? 15 

created all things and placed them under the govern- 
ment of fixed laws, and then retired, so to speak, in 
the depths of his own solitude, leaving the universe 
itself and all created intelligences to work out their 
destiny in obedience to these laws. 

These objections are founded in ignorance. They 
are founded, first, in an ignorance of what divine 
greatness consists in. The true greatness of God 
consists in his almightiness — in the fact that his om. 
nipotence is equal to any and everything consistent 
with himself and in harmony with his own almighty 
purposes ; and hence, to make their objections valid, 
the objectors must show wherein it would be incon- 
sistent with himself, or with his purposes, for the 
Sovereign God to care for the meanest thing 1 he has 
created. On the contrary, it were easy to show 
that for him to create a world and then abandon it 
to a s} 7 stem of laws which, notwithstanding he or- 
dained them himself, he had voluntarily put beyond 
his' control — or that for him to create an immortal 
soul, and then leave it to fight its way through sin and 
suffering without the care and watchfulness which 
his almightiness gives him the ability to bestow — 
would be unparalleled cruelty, and nothing else. 

These objections are founded, in the second 
place, in an ignorance of the difference — the infinite 
difference — between human and divine greatness. 
Now, among finite beings, it is not easy, nor is it 
always possible, to combine attention to what is 
minute or comparatively unimportant with atten- 
tion to what is of vast moment. The highest human 
greatness may not always be able to do this, and for 



16 PMU P. Neely's Sermons. 

the reason that the greatness is Unite, and therefore 
limited. But who would say that this defection was 
an excellence ? Who would deny that to unite in 
one being the power to attend to things compara- 
tively unimportant, as well as things of vast mo- 
ment, would be an excellence? Who would deny 
that the man in whom they were combined, and who 
used his greatness and employed his power in look- 
ing after the unimportant as well as the momentous 
interests committed to him, would, in the degree he 
did this, be entitled to our admiration and respect? 
or that, having this power and refusing to use it, he 
would be entitled to our scorn and indignation? 

Who among you can deny these things ? Would 
there not be a feeling amounting to veneration 
toward that ruler who should prove himself equal to 
the superintending of every great concern of an 
empire, and who could yet give a personal attention 
to the wants of many of the poorest of its families; 
and who, while gathering within the compass of an 
ample intelligence every question of foreign and 
home policy — protecting the commerce, maintaining 
the honor, and fostering the institutions of the 
State — could minister tenderly at the bedside of 
sickness, and hearken patiently to the tale of 
calamity, and be as active for the widow and the 
orphan as though his one business were to lighten the 
pressure of domestic affliction among his subjects? 
Now, if this be true as to an earthly ruler, it must be 
equally true as to the Almighty Euler. To us, whose 
minds are so easily distracted by a multiplicity of 
objects, it seems inconceivable that it should be 



What is the Almighty f 17 

otherwise with God. And this is the secret of much 
of the infidelity I am trying to combat. We will 
not get away from the unreasonableness of judging 
of the Almighty by ourselves. To bring him down 
to the level of our comprehension, we clothe him 
with our own impotency. We transfer to his in- 
finite mind all the imperfections of our own faculties. 
While we add to the glories of his character by 
conceding that he has millions of worlds to look 
after, we then detract from the glories of that char- 
acter by saying that he looks after each of those 
worlds imperfectly. We believe in his creative 
greatness, yet we drag him down by our unbelief 
from the lofty summit of his sovereign power to the 
standard of our own paltry imagination. We 
admit that his very sovereignty and almightiness 
prove that he can diffuse the benefits of his power 
throughout all worlds ; and in the same breath we 
say that he cannot and will not diffuse them among 
the individuals of even one of those worlds. In 
this way, while we enlarge the provinces of his em- 
pire, we tarnish all the glory of this enlargement by 
saying that he has so much to care for, on account 
of his creative greatness, that we cannot now expect 
him to care minutely for any one of his provinces. 
What is this but measuring the Almighty by our 
own little selves ? To admit that he is the Almighty, 
and yet to deny that he is in every place and with 
every human being — w T hat is this but to magnify 
one of his perfections at the expense of another? 
What is this but to sacrifice his greatness in order 
that we may the more easily comprehend him ? and 
2 



18 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

what is this attempt to bring him within the grasp 
of our feeble capacity but the effacement of one of 
the glories of his character, which we ought to adore 
as higher than all thought and above all comprehen- 
sion? These are some of the results of that igno- 
rance which would measure Divine greatness by 
our limited notions of human greatness. 

These objections to God's providence are founded, 
in the third place, in an ignorance — at least, in a 
denial — of the obligations implied in the simple 
fact of creation. If God created all things, he must, 
to be consistent with every acknowledged principle 
of justice and tenderness, have a fatherly concern 
for all things. Whatever be deemed worthy to 
make he must deem worthy of his preservation, 
otherwise he is chargeable with the folly of creating 
what was not worth caring for. Therefore, if any 
thing exists that could not have existed but by his 
power, it must, if he be a wise Creator, be worthy 
of his watchful regard. It follows, then, that his 
universal providence is an inference necessarily 
drawn from the truth of his being the universal 
Creator. You may ask how it is that the great God, 
who "sitteth upon the circle of the earth," and to 
whom the " inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers," 
can care for the animalcule as it floats upon the 
evening breeze; but I ask in reply, Was it this 
great God that gave substance and animation to 
that invisible atom? and until you can show me 
that it had some other Creator, I hold it to be every 
way worthy of God to be its guardian; for it can- 
not be more true that as universal Creator he had 



What is the A Imighty ? 19 

the power to bring the tiny insect into being than 
that as universal sustain er he has both the power 
and the disposition to care for it as an offspring of 
his creative power. The greatness of God, then, 
as the Creator of innumerable worlds, becomes 
an argument in support of his care for the work- 
manship of his hands. The more we know of 
the extent of creation the loftier will be the con- 
ceptions of a devout science of Him who presides 
over so wide an empire. It adds to the bright 
catalogue of his other attributes to say that while 
magnitude does not overpower him minuteness 
cannot escape him, nor variety bewilder him; and 
that at the very time, and while his mind is abroad 
over the whole vastness of creation, there is not one 
particle of matter — not one individual principle of 
rational or of animal existence, not one single 
world in that expanse which teems with them — that 
his eye does not discern as constantly, and his hand 
guide as unerringly, and his spirit watch and care 
for as vigilantly, as if it formed the one and exclu- 
sive object of his attention. 

The argument of infidelity, then, against the 
providence of God becomes, when examined, a 
mountain of proof in its favor. But this unbelief 
as to God's providence is founded mainly on an 
ignorance of the nature of God and of his relations 
to his creatures, as this nature and these relations 
are revealed to us in his Word. In that Word he is 
revealed as a God of majesty, of infinite power and 
wisdom and love; as the Father of all, and as mo- 
mentarily engaged in promoting the happiness of 



20 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

his children. I need not give you chapter and verse 
to prove this. It runs all through the writings of 
those holy men of old, who thought and spoke as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And it is a 
remarkable fact, too, that in proportion to the view 
they had of the greatness and glory of God were 
their confidence and hope in him as their Father and 
Friend. Xow, according to their representation of 
him as a being possessing omniscience, it is evident 
that nothing can happen in any part of the universe 
but by his appointment or permission. Remember 
now that it is either by his appointment or permis- 
sion, fur it is admitted that while he governs all 
things, both in heaven and earth, there is much 
which he allows to be done that cannot be referred 
directly to his authorship. And yet his Word tells 
us that his providence overrules even evil things 
so as to make them subservient to the march of 
his purposes. 

When you ask, then, "What is the Almighty?" 
I answer that according to his Word he is the First 
Cause of things, and that upon him all secondary 
causes, whether of good or evil, depend. This I 
hold to be a self-evident principle, and yet men are 
prone to forget it. Whenever you get away from 
this self-evident principle, you will find yourselves 
lost in a wide labyrinth and perplexed by the mul- 
tiplicity of agencies with which you will find your- 
selves surrounded; but if you hold yourselves to 
the divine record, which even your reason will in- 
dorse in this matter, you will find every thing un- 
folding in beautiful and simple order, and all tend- 



What is the Almighty ? 21 

ing to confirm you in the belief of God's universal 
providence. According to this self-evident princi- 
ple, which I need not argue, it is the Almighty 
whose energies are extended through earth and sea 
and air, causing those unnumbered and beneficial 
results which we ascribe to nature. By him all 
those contingencies which seem to us fortuitous 
and casual are directed, so that events brought 
round by what men call accident are only so many 
parts of his providence. It is his almighty influ- 
ence that softens the obdurate heart of the sinner 
and works upon the rebellious will, so that there is 
never a good thought conceived, nor a good purpose 
formed, nor a good action done in the world that 
may not be traced to his instigation. It is the 
Almighty from whom come those interpositions 
by which dangers are averted, fears dispersed, and 
sorrows removed. He, in a word, is the great First 
Cause, on which all secondary and subordinate causes 
are made to depend. The Scriptures so represent 
him, and yet you ask, " What is the Almighty, that 
I should serve him ? " Where, I ask, is the solitude 
he does not fill? Where is the motion, from the 
revolving world to the floating atom he does not 
direct? Where is the creature he does not sustain ? 
Where is the want he does not supply ? If, with 
the psalmist, we could ascend up to heaven or make 
our bed in hell; if we could take the wings of the 
morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea; if we could make this mighty exploration 
through the untracked deserts of space, and along 
the infinitudes of heaven and hell, we would never 



22 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

find a world so lonely as to be without him — never 
find a habitation so humble as that he was not pres- 
ent as Protector and Defender, nor a human being 
so lowly as that he did not encamp around him as 
Guardian and Comforter. O it is the confessed 
nature of his Godhead that gives me assurance that 
in all the greatness of his al mightiness he pervades 
every system and sun and star with his presence; 
always present everywhere — present as much at one 
moment as at another, present as much in one world 
as in another immeasurably distant, and covering 
with the wings of his providence all that he has 
formed and every thing he has animated. O it is 
impossible that he should ever lose sight, even for 
one moment, of any thing he has created. His Word 
is as clear on this point as it is of his existence. It 
is clear to reason too, when she looks at it with rev- 
erent and devout eye. And this shows how widely 
diversified and how multiplied into many thousand 
distinct exercises is the attention of God. Who 
can think of it without adoration ? Who can com- 
pass this great thought and not be willing to serve 
him ? To me it is the most precious of all thoughts 
that his eye is on me every moment of my existence — 
to know that his Spirit is present with every thought 
of my heart, that his inspiration gives birth to eveiw 
good purpose within me; that his presiding influence 
keeps by me through the whole current of my rest- 
less and ever-changing history; that when I walk 
by the way-side, he is with me; that when I enter 
company, amid all my forgetful ness he never for- 
gets me ; that in the silent watches of the night, when 



What is the Almighty? 23 

all unconscious, the Eye that never slumbers is upon 
me. I cannot if I would, and I would not if I 
could — no, not for worlds — fly from his presence ! Go 
where I will, he tends me and watches me and cares 
for me ; and the same Being who is at work through- 
out unnumbered worlds is at work with me and for 
my present and eternal good. O I will not, I cannot 
let go my confidence in God ! 'No matter what 
comes, I will hold on to this anchor. Fortune may 
go, friends may desert — foes may unite, devils may 
league, for my destruction — yet I will not be afraid; 
for he notices the falling sparrow, and I know that 
I am of more value than many sparrows. Trusting 
in him, I can dare to do right in the face of the 
world's loud laugh of scorn; and by his grace I will. 

This is the Almighty Creator and Guardian of 
worlds who claims your service, and whose almight- 
iness is pledged not only to direct and uphold the 
mighty globes with which immensity is peopled, 
but to care for each dweller on these globes as con- 
stantly and as watchingly as though he were the 
only being that lives. 

I love to contemplate God as the Architect of crea- 
tion, filling the vast void with magnificent struct- 
ures. I love to think of the attributes that make 
up his Godhead, and which flame out around his 
august character with a glory divine and unap- 
proachable — his omniscience, his omnipresence, 
his omnipotence, and his eternity. When I think 
of these — so high, so sublime, so God-like — I am 
awed into silent admiration ; but when I think of 
his providence, which engages all these mighty at- 



24 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

tributes for my care, it commends itself to my grat- 
itude and love, and I feel that had I a thousand 
souls to give, this God should have them all. O I 
cannot see how any man can withhold his reverence, 
his confidence, his life-long service, when he thinks 
of this Almighty Being as superintending all that 
has form or life in his boundless dominions — guiding 
the roll of every planet, and the rush of every cata- 
ract, and the motion of every will; tending the 
couch of the sick man on his pallet of straw; guard- 
ing the lonely widow as she toils through the night, 
and until the day dawns, that her children may have 
bread ; keeping watch with the soldier as he biv- 
ouacs under the light of stars, and with the sailor- 
boy as he swings in his hammock and dreams of 
home; and with the lonely orphan, who has no 
father but the Father in heaven. it would take 
from this Almighty all that is encouraging in his 
attributes were you to throw doubt on this doctrine 
of universal providence. To say that because he 
is the Almighty he is therefore separated from 
me, and cannot or will not be my Guardian, would 
be to put hot curses on my lips, for having given 
me life amid such perils as surround me and then 
denied me the only help that can afford security. I 
marvel not that men who have planted themselves 
on this rock of unbelief should cry out in tones of 
defiant scorn, "What is the Almighty, that we 
should serve him? " and that they should gird them- 
selves to meet his wrath as the martyr meets the de- 
vouring flames. But I marvel more that men will 
not admit the light of this faith and the joy and 



What is thelAlmighty t 25 

hope, the tranquillity and trust, it brings. And I 
marvel more than all that any of you who are per- 
suaded that all the Divine greatness is under contin- 
ual tribute for human happiness ; who believe that 
the almightiness of God is pledged for the guard- 
ianship and protection of those who submit them- 
selves to his will, and that his providence extends 
to every thing that has life — to the king in his pur- 
ple, to the beggar in his rags — the greatest of all 
marvels to me is that you who believe his Word 
when it declares that not even "a sparrow falls to 
the ground without his notice, '' and that even the 
"hairs of your head are numbered," can withhold 
from him, even for one day or hour, the love and 
gratitude of your hearts, and the service of your 
lives. 

there is no contentment, no peace, no joy in this 
world that can equal that of serving God in the 
unwavering trust that our whole lives are directed 
by his ordering; that his providence is with us when 
we go forth to our daily tasks, as well as when clos- 
eted with him in prayer ; that he bears us company 
in our toils, and sits down with us as we gather our 
little ones for the scanty meal; that we cannot weep 
a tear which he does not see, nor breathe a wish 
which he does not hear; that the very same provi- 
dence which guides the marchings of planets and 
regulates the convulsions of empires is with us at all 
times, in all places, and under all circumstances. 
To have this trust is to have all undue anxieties 
dismissed, all our energies fully employed and 
rightfully directed, and to rest in undisturbed tran- 



26 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

quillity and peace, To have this faith would be to 
leave every thing, great and small, in the hands of 
one who is almighty, and who cannot be perplexed 
by multiplicity nor overpowered by magnitude; and 
the result would be that neither those little cares 
that ruffle the surface of the sea of life nor those 
fiercer storms that breathe threatenings of ship- 
wreck could mar the peace or disturb the serenity of 
our souls. to have this trust is to have our hope 
planted in Christ; and if hope be fixed on that Rock 
of Ages, " which was rent on purpose, that there 
might be a holding place for the anchors of a perish- 
ing world," how else than calm can we be as our 
barks ride the turbulent sea of time? O doubting 
one, you may refuse this trust, you may intrench 
yourself in doubt, you may stand up in the citadel 
of your unbelief and proudly ask, " What is the Al- 
mighty, that I should serve him?" — you may de- 
spise the hope which this trust offers — but without 
this anchor of the soul you are doomed to final and 
irretrievable shipwreck. You may, by possibility, 
escape it in time, but I know of a coming tempest 
that will wreck your vessel and strand your hopes. 
It will be a tempest that will terribly shake the earth 
and scatter the stars from their places in the sky. 
It will be that hurricane which when it has passed 
will leave vessels now laden with reason, and high 
intelligence, and noble faculty drifting to and fro, 
shattered and dismantled, and to be cast at last as 
fuel in the flames unquenchable. But, blessed 
be God, there are vessels though which, when that 
fearful tempest is over, and the light of the morning 



What is the Almighty f 27 

which is to know no night breaks forth gloriously 
upon the horizon of eternity, will be found fast 
anchored by the throne of God and floating tran- 
quilly in the sea of his love. These be they — and 
that you may he of that number! — who have chosen 
the service of the Almighty, who were girded by 
him for the journey of life, who committed them- 
selves to his care, who trusted themselves to his 
providence, whose hope was anchored on Christ, 
" within the vail;" and these, when the judgment 
storm will be convulsing earth and sea and sky, 
will be heard singing as they round the last point 
and enter the port: 

Into the harbor of heaven we glide, 
Softly we drift on its bright silver tide, 
For we're home at last! 



Holiness and Usefulness. 



"And I beseech you, brethren, suffer the word of exhorta- 
tion." Hebrews xiii. 22. 

I PROPOSE, in this opening service of the new 
year, to offer you a word of exhortation on 
some matters which enter into our organization as 
a Church, and which I think are essential to our 
prosperity as a Christian people. And in order that 
I may have some general landmarks to guide me 
in this exhortation, I will read you first these words 
of the Apostle Paul, addressed to the Church at 
Rome: "I would have you wise unto that which is 
good and harmless concerning evil ; " next, these 
words of the same apostle, written to the Philippian 
Church : " That ye may be harmless, the sons of God 
without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and per- 
verse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the 
world; ? ' and also his advice to the Church at Ga- 
latia : "As we have opportunity, let us do good unto 
all men." 

In connection with these scriptures, I shall refer 
also to-day to some directions for Christian con- 
duct, to be found in the General Rules of our 
Church. 

Mr. Wesley's object in the organization of his 
United Societies in England and America was per- 



Holiness and Usefulness. 29 

sonal holiness and usefulness — the first embracing 
the fundamental principle, and the second com- 
prising the end of his organization ; and if the his- 
tory of that organization shows, as I think it most 
unquestionably does, that it has accomplished that 
object, it is a better vindication of the claims of 
Methodism upon the people of this country than 
can be presented by any Christian body that has 
not outstripped her in the great mission of mak- 
ing men holy and useful. 

That form of Christianity which does most to- 
ward the moral rehabilitation of humanity has the 
highest claims upon a Christian nation for appre- 
ciation and respect. 

I am honest in the belief that the form of Chris- 
tianity known as Episcopal Methodism has made 
more ample provisions for reproducing the central 
idea of Christianity, which is holiness, than has 
been made since the days of the apostle. 

This is not the language of bigotry, but of sober 
conviction; and it is because of this conviction 
that I am identified, and expect ever to be identified, 
with Episcopal Methodism in her grand purpose 
of saving souls. 

To be convinced that this is true of this form of 
Christianity, you have only to look at the doctrines 
of Methodism — her rules for living and the aids to 
the culture of a holy life, interwoven with her pol- 
ity — and which are laid down in what is known as 
the General Rules of our Church. 

Her doctrines are authenticated by the Divine 
Word. They fit into the fallen condition of humanity, 



30 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

and contemplate its redemption by means of a uni- 
versal atonement, and upon the condition of spot- 
less, self-denying, holy living. 

However, it is to her General Rule3 as containing 
a complete direction for the attainment of holiness 
and usefulness that I shall refer in the course of 
this exhortation. 

In those General Rules, the basis of Church-mem- 
bership is reduced to one simple condition, and 
that is, "A desire to flee from the wrath to come, 
and to be saved from sin." 

Methodism holds that where a sinner is truly 
awakened to a sense of his danger, and a desire for 
salvation, he should at once place himself in a sit- 
uation where he can receive the greatest spiritual 
help, and that therefore his proper place is in the 
Church of Christ — not to sit down in self-satisfied 
security and ease, but to follow those godly direc- 
tions which the Church offers as helps to him who 
is seeking salvation, and which, if faithfully followed, 
will infallibly lead to it. 

The basis of membership being fixed in our Gen- 
eral Rules, it is next asserted that when this u de- 
sire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be 
saved from sin," is really fixed in the soul, it will 
be shown by its fruits. A test, you see, is at once 
instituted; and that testis negative and positive — 
that is, the desire will prove itself genuine first by 
what the man avoids, and next by what he does. 
Hence, in our Book of Discipline we read : " It is ex- 
pected of all who continue therein" — that is, in our 
Church — " that they should evidence their desire 



Holiness and Usefulness. 31 

of salvation first by doing no harm — by avoiding 
evil of every kind, especially that which is most 
generally practiced ; " and the General Rules go on 
then to specify the evils to be avoided. 

The first provision now, which our Church sets 
forth for making her membership holy and useful, 
is harmlessness. They are to do no harm — to avoid 
evil of every kind, especially those common evils 
of society which, although allowable by our social 
canons, are not in harmony with the Christianity of 
the New Testament, and cannot be habitually in- 
dulged in without serious damage to personal 
piety. 

Although Mr. Wesley never did sever his con- 
nection with the Church of England, he felt called 
upon, in the order of Providence, to give system to 
the religious movement of which he was the leading: 
instrument; so that what was intended at first 
merely as a reformation in the Church became, iu 
the providence of God, a distinct and regularly or- 
ganized Church, which, while it retained the doc- 
trines and many of the forms of the old Establish- 
ment, proclaimed a higher practical Christianity 
and adopted rules for its attainment. 

It begins by insisting that its membership must 
be blameless in life — that they must avoid evil of 
every kind, especially those social evils the prac- 
tice of which had obliterated all distinction between 
the Church and the world, and which had shorn the 
English Church of its saving power. 

This harmlessness which is taught in our General 
Rules, while it is essentially negative, is nevertheless 



32 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

the only foundation on which a man can build a 
holy, useful life. In fact, to be blameless in life is 
to be holy in life ; and this very harmlessuess, or 
innocence, will of itself become a force — silent and 
unobtrusive it may be, yet nevertheless positive and 
efficient. This is taught by the apostle, when he 
says : " Do all things without murmurings and dis- 
putings, that ye may be blameless and harmless, the 
sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a 
crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine 
as lights in the world." The very fact that they 
were blameless and harmless in life, and that they 
avoided evil of every kind, made them the light- 
givers of Christianity to that age. This of itself 
made them luminous with innocence — made them 
examples of holy, self-denying purity to that crooked 
and perverse nation, among whom they stood as 
givers out of Christian light. 

No matter what may be a man's capabilities for 
being useful, they must be bottomed on harmless- 
ness before they can avail much. There are many 
men in the Church who if they would lay this 
foundation would be eminently useful. They have 
talents, social gifts, general influence, every element 
of usefulness ; yet their lives are not blameless. 
Their religion is latitudinarian, and their influence 
in the Church is destroyed. They seem intent on 
doing good, yet not being equally intent on doing 
no harm, their attempts to do good result in just 
nothing at all. The positive part of their religion 
is neutralized by their inattention to the negative. 
They are like sentinels who sleep at their posts and 



Holiness and Usefulness. 33 

endanger the whole army by a betrayal of their 
trust. They are stumbling-blocks in the way of 
the unconverted. They are the barriers that break 
and scatter the streams of revival that would other- 
wise gladden the City of God. They quench the 
good influence of the Divine Spirit, and even repel 
it from the congregation. They chill and disheart- 
en the preacher. They neutralize the gospel ; and 
better for him and that gospel that he stand alone, 
like Paul on Mars' Hill, than be surrounded by such 
latitudinarian professors of religion, as the lights by 
which the people are to be illuminated. 

It only needs attention to this first direction in 
our General Eules for the Church here and every- 
where else to exert a tremendous influence for good 
among the people. If Christians would determine 
to avoid evil of every kind, and to be examples of 
holy, self-denying, religious virtue, the very spot- 
iessness of their lives would be a standing rebuke 
to the sin and wickedness and folly of the age, and 
would commend religion as the great conservator of 
society. In this respect the young people of the 
Church in this city have lodged in their hands a fear- 
ful responsibility. They have it in their power to 
control society. They have position and influence 
and numbers, and could, if they were so minded 
and would act in concert, frown down mauy of those 
amusements and follies which even the world pro- 
nounces incompatible with a high standard of Chris- 
tian excellence, but which, alas ! too many profess- 
ing Christians relish and encourage. 

Whatever course others may pursue, I implore 
3 



34 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

you who have been committed to my spiritual keep- 
ing and direction to set yourselves resolutely 
against all violation of those vows in which you 
pledged yourselves to renounce the devil and all his 
works, together with the pomps and vanities of the 
world, so that you would neither follow nor be led 
by them. I solemnly beseech you, my children in 
Christ, to resolve — on this first Sabbath of a new 
year — that while you will cultivate and exhibit the 
amenities and courtesies of social life, as far as 
Christian refinement will safely permit you, you 
will not, to secure the commendation of anybody, 
prove recreant to your solemn Church covenant, or 
take part in any of those social evils which both 
your Church and the Word of God declare to 
be inconsistent with Christian profession and char- 
acter. 

It will not do to lower our standard of piety 
down to the social level. No matter what other 
Churches may tolerate, there are certain social evils 
and practices which, from the beginning, Method- 
ism has declared wrong; and in doing this she has 
only repeated what the Word of God has said. I 
dare to say, therefore, that if, as a member of that 
Church, you are not a good and holy man, it is not 
from any defect in her provisions for making you 
holy, but because you have failed to live up to her 
standard. It is the failure of her members to con- 
form to her Rules, and especially in the matter of 
those social evils, that is hindering her progress 
more than the open opposition of a wicked world 
in the beginning of her history ever did. It is de- 



Holiness and Usefulness. 35 

fection here, my brethren, and a popularization of 
this defection in the Church, that is binding and 
retarding the operations of our admirable machinery. 
The great evil among us is a neglect of the Rules 
we have promised to live by, the following of evils 
which we have promised to renounce. Our offense 
is an aggregation of smaller offenses, which our 
General Rules tell us to avoid. It consists in an 
irreverent use of the sacred name of God, in a 
profanation of the holy Sabbath, in brother's going 
to law with brother, in uncharitable and unprofit- 
able conversation, in speaking evil of magistrates 
and ministers, in doing to others as we would not 
have them do unto us, in doing what we know is not 
for the glory of God, in needless self-indulgence, in 
conforming to the spirit and practice of the world — 
in doing those things, in short, which are catalogued 
in our Rules as the evils we are to avoid. 

There are hundreds in our Communion who have 
not so much as read these Rules, and hundreds more 
who have gradually ceased to respect and regard 
them, until all distinction between them and the 
avowed worldly religionist has perished. 

Let me be personal here, and ask, How is it with 
you in the matter? When you entered into mem- 
bership in the Methodist Church, you did it per- 
haps because of the ample provision she makes 
for Christian nurture. You wanted to get to 
heaven, and you entered her pale with a warm 
heart and an earnest zeal. In the outset you were 
faithful to all your duties, and you gave promise of 
great usefulness. You had the confidence of all 



36 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

your brethren, and were at peace with God and the 
world. The love-feast, the class-room, the prayer- 
meeting, the Sabbath-school — these constituted your 
chief joy. You did no harm; you avoided evil of 
every kind, especially those named in our General 
Rales; you were a simple-hearted, useful, happy man, 
honoring God and loving your Church. How is 
it with you now? You are perhaps far away from 
your former loyalty — have lost your zeal, your love, 
and with them your happiness. Prosperity brought 
worldliness, and worldliness opened the way to 
folly, until now, although you have a name to live, 
you are spiritually dead. The evil began when 
you began to neglect this first rule for Method- 
ist living, "Doing no harm, avoiding evil of every 
kind,'' and it went on until the light in you became 
darkness. 

The only way to a beautiful Christian life lies 
through harmlessness, or innocence. It is the first 
step, and it must be kept up all the way, or all efforts 
to be useful will fail. Not unfrequently when our 
young people seem to be doing well, and giving 
promise of eminent usefulness, they are seen mak- 
ing compromises with the world as to some of its 
evil practices and fashionable follies, and the hope- 
ful harvest is blighted. In this way they afflict 
their pastor, they sadden their friends, they gratify 
the enemies of religion, they blast all the good they 
have done, and are in peril of bringing irretrievable 
ruin upon their souls. if you have an earnest 
desire to flee from the wrath to come and to be 
saved from your sins, and have sought membership 



Holiness and Usefulness. 37 

in the Church with a view of receiving help, do not 
forget that you are to evidence the sincerity of your 
desire first by doing no harm, and by avoiding evil 
of every kind. Bat this not all. So far, religion is 
only negative. Our General Rules make other pro- 
visions. We are not only to do no harm, but in the 
second place we are to do "good of every possible 
sort, and, as far as possible, to all men — to their 
bodies and to their souls;" and this is what may be 
called positive religion — a religion that is not onty 
blameless but lays itself out in all good and right- 
eous works. 

It were no doubt a great improvement (as Dr. 
Olin has said) upou the actual condition of the 
Church if her members were harmless — were so 
consistent as to bring no reproach on the cause of 
Christ, and to present no obstacle in the way of the 
success of the gospel; yet it must be confessed that 
simple harmlessness would be a very poor and de- 
graded type of piety. It is a good foundation, but 
it is not the completed building. To this negative 
Christianity must be added a vast outlay of positive 
power. This is true of personal religion, and it is 
eminently true of religion as an aggressive force. 
In fact, the availability of the death of Christ in the 
redemption of our race depends on it. I do not go 
beyond the truth when I say that the Church, as 
the representative of Christ, has only to withdraw 
its positive outlay in the world for the world to 
be hopelessly ruined. He has only to let sinners 
alone for them to be lost. It is true the inter- 
position of grace and of providence would still 



38 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

alarm them; they would still be awakened by 
the Spirit and summoned by nature from the 
deep foundations among the rocks to her resi- 
dences among the clouds, to come back to their 
heritage; yet God has ordained that these agencies 
of salvation are to be made effective through the 
zeal and energy of his Church, and hence it only 
requires that his people content themselves with 
doing no harm for the world to be speedily ruined. 
How poor that ambition, then, that would be satisfied 
with a harmless piety, a religion whose only virtue is 
that it does no harm in the world; and I am afraid 
that with many this is their ideal of religion. They 
have no higher wish than to live so as to injure no- 
body. This is their highest contemplated attain- 
ment in religion. They are willing to receive 
quietly all they can get, yet never aspire to send 
back something in return. 

In political economy men are taught not only to 
consume but to produce, and failure leads to pauper- 
ism. The rule will apply in religion. The man 
who simplydoes no harm — who reduces his religion 
to mere quietism, who is content to dream away 
his life in conventicle peace — consumes, without pro- 
ducing. Such men become dead weights in a 
Church. They are actually burdens, and, if they 
make any progress at all in religion, owe their ad- 
vance to others who bear them on, just as the 
swelling tide bears light, unresisting substances to 
land. The point I make is that we must do the 
work of Christ, as well as feel his power, or our 
religion will be worth nothing. What made the 



Holiness and Usefulness. 39 

conduct of the man that buried his talent so repre- 
hensible? It was his want of productiveness, his 
being satisfied simply with doing no harm. My 
brother, you must put away this low view of duty 
and obligation if you would have an evangelical 
piety. You dishonor religion, and as Methodists you 
dishonor your Church, if you dole out your obedience 
and your sacrifices as if afraid of going beyond the 
minimum of religion. The founder of your religion, 
and the founder of your Church, provided for you 
to proceed upon a scale of large and generous liber- 
ality, in obedience and sacrifice. Do not act to- 
ward Christ as if you believed that he is " an austere 
man, reaping where he has not sown, and gathering 
where he never scattered;" but let your obedience 
be prompt and cheerful, and in evidence of a great 
gratitude for his mercies. You should anxiously 
inquire, How much can I do for my Lord ? rather 
than How little may 1 dare do and be safe? 

There are hundreds who gauge their piety and 
reduce it down to the least standard compatible 
with the hope of salvation. Their whole study is 
to find out the least possible amount of religion 
that will keep them from being lost. They never 
aim at any thing higher, nor want any thing more. 
They drift into a style of religion that just keeps 
their hopes of heaven alive; and fortifying them- 
selves there, they bid defiance to every attempt to 
urge them to better things. All the arguments of 
the pulpit, all its urgent calls to higher attainments 
and to greater sacrifices, they treat with cool indif- 
ference, or taunt as pulpit extravagance. The most 



40 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

solemn appeals to their reason and conscience and 
interest fail to disenchant them or to rouse them 
from their carnal security. They seem to have 
made up their minds to expend just as little as 
possible in the way of self-denial and cross-bearing 
on the way to heaven, and to do nothing more than 
will barely keep them from being damned. All the 
use their servile souls have for religion is to keep 
them out of perdition. More than that they do not 
want, do not ask for, and would not have, even were 
it pressed upon them. More than that would crowd 
out those worldly follies and pleasures and amuse- 
ments which in the face of a loudly protesting 
gospel they have determined to enjoy. The only 
obedience they will tolerate is that sentimental 
obedience which a fashionable, worldly piety con- 
descends to popularize, and which manifests itselt 
in a venerable creed and a pompous ritual. I ask 
now, in all honesty, What claims (historic or other- 
wise) has a worldly religion like this upon our ap- 
preciation or respect? I ask, in all sincerity, What 
can a religion like this do toward making the 
Church of Christ true to her appointed mission, 
which is the conversion of the world? And I ask 
further, If left to rely on such a religion, where 
would be the hope of the world ? It was a defective 
religion like this that called for the Lutheran refor- 
mation in the sixteenth century. It gave birth to 
the Wesleyan reformation in England a hundred 
years ago; and as long as the form of Christianity 
to which that reformation gave order and perma- 
nence provides for making men holy and useful, so 



Holiness and Usefulness. 41 

long will it present evangelical claims upon thi 
country which the living and sanctifying Spirit of 
God will approve and indorse. 

I call upon you to-day to be true to those great 
principles of your Church which for a century have 
been silently working their way into the great heart 
of humanit} 7 , until, from a few praying students at 
Oxford, XiiQy have multiplied into two million and 
more of communicants around the sacramental 
board. The secret of our success is to be found in 
the high standard of piety provided for in our Gen- 
eral Rules; and when that standard is given up — 
when as a Church we lose our distinction from the 
world and court its favor, and make a wholesale al- 
liance with its spirit and customs and evils, not 
only ceasing to avoid evil, but neglecting to do 
good — when we do this, then our glory will have 
departed, and the hope of humanity will depend on 
the rising up of some modern Luther or Wesley to 
lead it back to God and heaven. 

I appeal to you to-day, as a part of the Methodist 
family, and I beseech you as a congregation, to 
strive to bring your personal piety up to the standard 
laid down in our General Rules. Resolve that you 
will be a praying, active, holy people, and then will 
the hidings of God's power be with you indeed. It 
was this that made Methodism a great moral power 
a century ago, and it is this that will make it a 
power in the world to the end of time. 

The burden of Wesley's preaching was holiness 
and usefulness, and as he preached this gospel of 
reformation, he led the way in his experience and 



42 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

practice. The great doctrines he preached are the 
same to-day as then. While we continue steadfast 
in our belief of them, let us keep ever before us the 
two great objects to which they point. If Method- 
ism will do this, the world will acknowledge her 
claims. She will need no presentation of them by 
bishop or priest, for they will assert themselves. 
To-day the prayers of millions ascending from her 
altars assert them, and declare that her mission 
is not yet accomplished. Her people are no longer 
the despised people on whom political pride looked 
down with scorn a hundred years ago. She has 
outlived the rage and malice which sought to stran- 
gle her in her cradled innocence; the child of the 
storm has outlived the tempest, and to-day sends 
her forgiving salutations to the mother that op- 
pressed her, and her best wishes that that mother 
would forget all else in her desire to make men 
holy and useful. 

Holiness and usefulness were the watch-word of 
our fathers. They have constituted the battle-cry of 
our Church in all her conflicts with sin and Satan, 
and I pray God that they will continue to ring oat 
from the field of strife until her lengthening lines 
shall hail the breaking splendor of the millennial 
morn. 

followers of our ascended founder, stand in the 
way and catch his descending mantle! Hold on to 
the holiness and usefulness to which he called you 
and in which he led the way. 

From the beginning we have been opposed, even 
as Christ was opposed, yet our foot-prints are seen 



Holiness and Usefulness. 43 

on every continent on the globe. Those last words 
of the dying Wesley, " The best of all is, God is with 
us," still ring along our ranks, and burn brightly on the 
folds of our standard sheet. O brethren, while I bid 
Godspeed to any religious communion that seeks 
the salvation of sinners, I love with my whole heart 
that form of Christianity with which when a boy I 
linked my earthly fortunes, and which when I was 
eighteen years old commissioned me to preach the 
glorious gospel ot Christ. I love it for the good it 
has wrought for the world, as well as for the good 
it has wrought for me; for although it is but yester- 
day, it has filled innumerable graves with its happy 
dead, and sends out ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand living voices to swell its songs of triumph here 
below. From the great deep of my heart I can say, 
and that in this you all would accompany me : 

If e'er my heart forget 

Her welfare or her woe, 
Let every joy this heart forsake 

And ev'ry grief o'erflow ; 
For her my tears shall fall, 

For her my prayers ascend, 
To her my toils and cares be given, 

Till toils and cares shall end. 

God grant that having had a youth-time of in- 
credible hardships, yet of unparalleled success, we 
may never forget the secret of our power, and that 
when even a hundred centennial crowns shall hans: 
upon the hoary locks of our Zion, like the prophet on 
Nebo she may still look heavenward with eye un- 
dimmed and strength unabated! 



Making; Void the Law of God. 



"They have made void thy law." Psalm cxix. 126. 

IT is no pleasant task to attempt to determine the 
meaning of these words, and it is still less pleas- 
ant to apply their fearful meaning to those we love. 
They contain a grave indictment against the sinner 
for impiety — an indictment against many of you, 
for whose salvation I pray daily. You are solemnly 
charged in the text with having committed a high 
offense against the honor of God. It is alleged that 
you are living in a way that defeats the end for 
which his law was given. It was given as your 
rule of life — as a way-bill from time to eternity — 
as a directory which, if followed, will lead to happi- 
ness and usefulness in this life and to eternal bless- 
edness in the life to come. It was given that you 
might be saved from sin. It sets forth the atone- 
ment made for sin and the conditions on which the 
sinner can be made a sharer in its benefits. It 
gives plain and simple rules for regulating his life 
so as to please God, and be prepared for death. In 
a word, the great end and object of the law, in the 
sense we are now considering it, is his salvation. 
You are charged in the text with pursuing a course 



Making Void the Laic of God. 45 

of conduct that is making this law powerless to 
save you — with living so as to make utterly void 
this great agency which a merciful God has pro- 
vided for your salvation. This is the high offense 
for which you stand indicted before the court of 
conscience and truth, and of which, painful as the 
admission is to me, I solemnly believe you are 
guilty. Now, if it be true that you are guilty 
of this grave offense, there is but one hope for 
you, and that hope centers in Christ, who is ex- 
ceeding abundant in mercy. But even this hope 
rests upon a condition, and that condition is such 
a personal consciousness of guilt as will lead you 
in penitence to Christ as humble suppliants for his 
pardon. 

I stand here to prosecute you on the indictment 
brought against you in the text. Not as your ene- 
my, not in vindictiveness, no ! but as your friend, 
and in sorrowing sympathy, I charge you with 
making void the law of God. It is an awful crime, 
and if not followed by repentance unto salvation its 
inevitable penalty will be separation from God and 
happiness, and, by consequence, remorse and anguish 
intolerable forever. There is not the shadow of a 
doubt on my mind as to your guilt. I know that if 
ever pardoned it must be in time, that if you die unre- 
pentant and unforgiven, you will have to endure the 
terrible wrath of God eternally. I know too that al- 
though here now you may never be here again — that 
you may die before the next Sabbath service — that 
this may, by possibility, be our last interview, and 
I would do all I can to convince you of your guilt, 



46 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

and to persuade you to seek for pardon, and to seek 
for it at once. 

The accusation is that you have made void the 
law of God ; that notwithstanding he has graciously 
provided to save you, you are making that provision 
of no use to you — are, iu fact, defeating the great 
purpose of God, in the gift of his Son and in 
the revelation of his truth, which was that you 
might be led to salvation. The point now is to 
make you sensible of this, and I know not that this 
can better and more successfully be done than by 
holding up to your view a given course of conduct 
by which, the law of God is made void, and then 
leaving it to your consciousness as to whether you 
are following that course or not. 

In what way now may it be said that a man makes 
the law of God — the provisions of grace revealed in 
the gospel — of no use to him? How is this done? 
What are the ordinary methods by which this may 
be done, and by which it is done? 

1. In answer to this question, I would say, first, 
that the most successful way of making the law of 
God void is by unbelief. That law, being made up 
of regulations for right living, can become operative 
only through faith. That is to say, it must not only 
be revealed but believed and adopted as the rule of 
life. For a man therefore, from intellectual pride 
or from vanity, or from inward corruption and hos- 
tility to God, to reject the gospel as a revelation from 
God, and to publish his determination to walk sim- 
ply by the light of reason and according to his own 
depraved passions, is at once, and beyond all ques- 



Making Void the Law of God. 47 

tion, to make that revelation powerless to save him. 
That man who avows himself an infidel completely 
and effectually makes void the law. He places 
himself beyond the pale of its benefits; and so much 
of the marvelous does this involve that it seems to 
me to be barely possible that any sane man can 
reach the point where he may be said to have 
yielded up all belief in revelation. I can see how 
he may go so far as to have horrible and disquieting 
doubts of the truth of revelation, and may even per- 
suade himself that the weight of evidence is against 
its truth, yet it seems to me impossible that there 
should be found in Christendom one man utterly 
destitute of faith in the Christian religion. I am 
satisfied of one thing — that if a man has become in- 
volved in honest doubt on this questiou, and will 
give the claims of religion a fair and unprejudiced 
examination, he will find the weight of evidence 
abundantly in favor of its truth. The evidences of 
its truth are so mighty and so accumulating that 
unbelief must give way where the examination is 
conducted in candor and fairness. 

Most of the infidelity of modern times results from 
an aversion to religion rather than from a conviction 
of the mind. Men do not want to believe it true, 
because if true it is a loud condemnation of their 
lives. They therefore seize upon its mysteries 
and its abuses, and without investigation and in 
the face of the protesting instinct of their souls, 
delude themselves into a condition of doubt which 
as effectually makes void the law of God, so far as 
it relates to their salvation, as would a condition of 



48 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

settled unbelief which had been arrived at by the 
most logical and satisfying processes of examination. 
I know not that any of you who are on trial in this 
suit have reached this final stage of unbelief; but 
if you have, I ask you, as you value your soul, to 
put aside prejudice and your natural enmity to God 
and consider calmly and searchingly the position 
you have taken. Are you perfectly satisfied to de- 
pend on this unbelief in the dying-hour, and to 
hazard what is beyond death upon it? Do not 
evade the question, but look it squarely in the face. 
Can you even now, in the full flush of manhood, 
with the warm blood and the bounding pulse giving 
attraction to life, and holding death as something afar 
off — can you, I say, from this stand-point of health and 
hope, and supported only by unbelief, think calmly 
and without any sort of fear of the rigid limb, the 
glazed eye, the folded hands and the stilled heart? 
Can you think of the shroud, the coffin, the de- 
vouring worm, and the long night of darkness into 
which you must descend, without an inward misgiv- 
ing as to the unbelief with which you say you are 
satisfied? Can you follow the widowed soul upon 
its unknown journey along the track of eternity 
without recoiling from your unbelief? can you 
contemplate that solemn hour when the soft foot- 
fall, the hushed stillness, and the sob of some loving 
heart will tell that another soul is passing into the 
presence of God, without a secret feeling that in 
that trying hour your unbelief will fail you — with- 
out an instinctive consciousness that then, as the 
curdliug blood creeps slowly and still more slowly 



Making Void the Law of God. 49 

from the yielding citadel to the cold, death-chilled 
extremities, you will need this faith which you now 
deride — this precious law, which in your unbelief 
you are now making void? 

O doubting one, if while I speak to you there 
comes up from your soul, as I know there will, a 
voice, a felt whisper of fear that infidelity will not 
sustain you when soul and body are parting, let that 
voice plead with you to test religion by obedience, 
by experience; for if it is true, you are lost, 
ruined, damned forever; while if it is false, we 
who believe in it can never be harmed either in 
life, or in death, or through eternity, by our trust. 

2. But there is another way by which men make 
void the law of God, and it consists in so interpret- 
ing that law as to make it accommodate itself to the 
natural impiety of the human heart. This method, 
while it is more common than unbelief, is not less 
successful. It is one that prevails widely, and no 
doubt has its representatives before me. Those 
who adopt it are entirely free from religious doubts. 
They can repeat every point in the creed in full con- 
fidence of its truth. They have a high respect for 
religion and its services. They encourage it in the 
community and in their families. They look upon it 
as the great conservator of morals and as the mighti- 
est bulwark of liberty. They give it their patronage, 
and have no thought that they are living so as to shut 
themselves out from its saving power as effectually 
as the unbelieving infidel. They are doing this 
because of erroneous opinions as to the law of God. 
Error in opinion leads to error in practice. Their 
4 



50 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

theory is widely latitudinarian, and their conduct is 
any thing else than honoring to God's holy law. By 
a miserable misinterpretation of that law they bring 
it down to their conduct instead of bringing their 
conduct up to its high standard. They make it ac- 
commodative, so accommodative a3 to make it impos- 
sible to distinguish between religion and irreligion, 
between the Church and the world, between piety 
and impiety. Many of this class have entered the 
Church with these opinions, and their latitudina- 
rianism is called liberality. In all outward respects 
they honor their Christian profession. They pay 
their money out with an open, generous hand. 
They seat themselves decorously in the house of 
God with every returning Sabbath, and kneel de- 
voutly at the communion-table. They are zealous 
of the popularity of the Church, and are ambitious 
to see it eminently respectable; yet, notwithstand- 
ing all this, they so sadly misconstrue the require- 
ments of the law, so loosety interpret religion as to 
its inward spirit, and have so accustomed them- 
selves to hold the duties of religion in subordination 
to interest and fashion and the carnal desires of the 
heart, as, to all intents and purposes, to make void 
the law of God equally with the profane unbeliever. 
This was the class which God addressed when, by the 
mouth of the psalmist, he said, "Thou thoughtest 
that I was altogether such a one as thyself." They 
think of the holy God, and judge of him as they 
think and judge of themselves. They bring him 
down to their own corrupt standard, and hence, 
although he annexes a penalty to every transgres- 



Making Void the Law of God. 51 

sion of his law, they do not believe that he will really 
and rigidly enforce these penalties. They admit 
that his law enjoins duty, and demands fidelity in 
small as well as in great things; that it extends its 
dominion to the inner life as well as the outward, 
requiring, as the psalmist says, "truth in the inward 
parts," and pledging the justice of its author for the 
punishment of all who fail to meet even its smallest 
requirements ; but they do not seem to regard God 
as altogether meaning what he says in these mat- 
ters. They judge of him by a knowledge of them- 
selves, and cannot bring themselves to realize that 
he is fearfully in earnest in what he prohibits and 
requires, and will hoid every man to a strict account 
for his conduct in this world. Construing his law in 
this way, it is not surprising that their religious life 
should be one of wide latitude. Such persons are 
to be found in every communion in this Christian 
land; and although nominally members of the vis- 
ible body of Christ, they belong to the world. They 
are in sympathy with its temper and spirit. They 
do business upon its basis and according to its max- 
ims. They lead in its fashions, its customs, its 
amusements, and so far as the life goes are undeniably 
of the world. They know nothing of self-denial, of 
cross-bearing, of simple, unaffected, heart-felt relig- 
ion, and, apart from the profession of religion, have 
nothing to distinguish them from the great multi- 
tude who are openly and avowedly living for the 
things of time and sense. They are making the 
unavailing effort of trying to deceive God, or they 
are deceiving themselves by supposing that he is 



52 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

insincere in his threatenings and promises and will 
in the day of judgment overlook many things that 
he stands pledged to punish. What are they doing 
in all this but making void the law of God — making 
the gospel, which if received and obeyed is "the pow- 
er of God unto salvation," of no effect to their souls ? 
They are not only making void the law of God to 
themselves, but are making it powerless in their 
families and in the circle of their influence, which, 
owing to their wealth and position, is generally 
large. They are the cumberers of the ground al- 
luded to in the gospel — taking up room in the 
Church which but for them and their hurtful influ- 
ence might be occupied by fruitful Christians ; and 
they owe the prolongation of their unprofitable lives 
to the intercessions of Christ. 

3. There- is another class of Church-members who 
greatly impair the saving effects of the law of God 
by an habitual neglect of his sacraments and ordi- 
nances and regularly instituted means of grace. 

The principal value of Church-membership is 
that it admits us to the enjoyment of these chan- 
nels for the communication of grace and strength 
to the believing soul. No man can use them rev- 
erently without being profited, and no man who is 
fit to be a member of the Church can plead a want 
of qualification for using them. It is conscious 
need, and not worthiness as some seem to suppose, 
that qualifies for their use; and hence I hold that ev- 
ery man who really " desires to flee from the wrath 
to come and be saved from sin," however imperfect 
he may feel his life to be, ought to use them when- 



Making Void the Law of God. 53 

ever he has the opportunity. They have been given 
as helps to salvation, and to habitually neglect them 
is to put contempt upon God who enjoined them, 
and to make our growth in grace an impossibility. 
There are thousands of professing Christians 
who are willfully and habitually neglecting one 
or another of the institutions or ordinances and 
sacraments of God. Some make the Sabbath, 
which he has commanded us to keep holy, their 
day for self-indulgence or recreation. Some make 
their attendance upon the ordinance of preaching 
wholly a matter of convenience or pleasure, and 
do not hesitate to neglect it without the least 
feeling of compunction, for reasons the most trivial 
and selfish and worldly — such, for instance, as the 
want of a fashionable bonnet or a becoming dress. 
Some, again, think nothing of turning their backs 
every month upon the holy symbols of redemption 
as if they had no part or lot in them. brethren, 
it grieves me to see some of you as regularly as 
communion-day comes go away carelessly and lightly 
with the unbelieving multitude, when you have been 
invited and entreated so often to remain and unite 
with us in showing forth our Lord's death until his 
coming again. How can you find it in your hearts 
to so wantonly neglect his last and dying com- 
mand? Where is your gratitude, that you can go 
out with his enemies, and like Peter say, "We " know 
not the man?" Where is your love, that you can 
mingle with his murderers instead of his friends? 
Where is your judgment, your reason, that you 
can thus madly persist in a course of conduct which 



54 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

can have but one result, and that is to make void 
the law of God — to defeat its object and end, which 
is your salvation ? for how can it contribute to your 
salvation when you neglect its plainest commands 
and its divinely instituted means for spiritual 
culture and growth? I beseech you once more 
to put away your false scruples, and in the spirit of 
humility, and in the exercise of a holy trust, make 
these ordinances and sacraments a joy and a com- 
fort to your souls, instead of a standing testimony 
that you are making void the law of God. 

So far I have been striving to show that the 
charge in the text embraces many of those who 
have a place in the Church of God. 

4. I take the position now that the man who will- 
fully refuses obedience to God's law — who, in short, 
disobeys the gospel and refuses to accept the salva- 
tion it offers to him — is as effectually making it 
void as though it had never been provided or 
offered. Now, if this be true, it makes every man 
who stands outside the pale of a Christian pro- 
fession guilty of the charge presented in the text. 
There may be many inside that pale who are guilty, 
but, however that may be, it is true beyond all 
question that you who have willfully and deliber- 
ately, and against all the motives and considerations 
by which you have been entreated, refused to obey 
the law of God are guilty of having made void that 
law. You may not have culminated in impiety — 
may not have thrown off all restraint and published 
yourself to the world as an unbeliever in religion — 
yet you have reached that point at which desire 



Making Void the Law of God. 55 

supplants law, where appetite and lust, instead of 
the law of duty, control you ; and hence it may be 
said of you that you have as completely made void 
the law of God as though you had openly and defi- 
antly denied its claims upon you. 

By the law of God I mean the gospel, which from 
infancy up to this moment has been appealing to 
your fears, your gratitude, and your hopes for do- 
minion over you. "While it has told you how sin 
may be forgiven, it has told you how terrible will 
be the doom of the unrepentant and unforgiven 
sinner. While it has revealed the largest mercy to 
penitence, it has pledged the largest wrath to im- 
penitence. While it illustrates God's love for the 
sinner, it publishes his hatred of sin and the certain 
punishment that will follow its commission. While 
it unveils the cross with its unparalleled love, it un- 
covers hell with its retributive agony. It tells you, 
sinner, that there, on that hill of suffering, was 
exhausted the entire wisdom and power of the God- 
head for your salvation, and that for you now to 
reject that stupendous outlay in your behalf is not 
only to reject all that Divinity could do to save you, 
but is also to convert it all into an enginery for 
your destruction. It shows you how that by refus- 
ing to obey the gospel you compel God to the work 
of retribution; how that by impenitence and disobe- 
dience the sinner literally forces him to demonstrate 
in that sinner's eternal agonv the great truth that 
God "out of Christ is a consuming fire." In this 
way the law of God appeals to your fears and leaves 
you without excuse. It appeals also to your grati- 



56 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

tude, your hope, and your desire for happiness. 
What is it but a record of love, of sacrifices made, 
of sufferings endured, of agonies borne, and of a 
death submitted to for you, and submitted to under 
circumstances of unheard of shame and torture, and 
for enemies too? sinner, what is this law, this 
gospel, but a testimony to the patience and long- 
suffering of God ? What is it but a publication of 
his forbearance with you ? What is it but a wit- 
ness of the love wherewith he has loved you, who 
by your disobedience have made all his efforts for 
your salvation of no effect? What is it but an ap- 
peal to your highest hopes and your loftiest ambi- 
tion ? It tells you that by foregoing the ephemeral 
good of the present you can secure the eternal good 
of the future. And in calling for this, it asks you 
to surrender nothing of real value — nothing that 
reason approves or that immortality desires. It 
leaves you every pleasure that can be enjoyed without 
a blush or remembered without remorse. Its only 
demand is that you flee those vices whose end is 
death, and that you cultivate those virtues whose 
fragrance reaches out into eternity. And while 
calling for these things, it unveils a reward radiant 
with the splendors of eternity to encourage and an- 
imate you in the struggle for salvation. O I count 
it one of the glories of the gospel that while it re- 
presses all that is evil in man it gives unlimited 
scope to all that is noble. It appeals not only to 
his fears and gratitude and love, but to his high 
ambition, by presenting objects on which he can 
pour out all the mightiness of his soul and gather no- 



Making Void the Law of God. 57 

bility through his great aspirations. It points him to 
a heavenly kingdom where rewards are to be grad- 
uated by works, and calls upon him to strive for 
the largest recompense within the gift of God. It 
comes to the man who is prostituting his great en- 
ergies to the pursuit of bubbles that may be broken 
by a breath, and tells him of places of dignity, of 
stations of eminence, of crowns and scepters which 
may be won and worn in the kingdom of God, and 
bids him enter the list of noble competitors for 
these immortal prizes. This is what this law of the 
Lord has done for you. These are the lofty emi- 
nences to which it would direct your weary feet. O 
it sets before you pyramid rising above pyramid in 
glory, throne above throrfe, palace above palace ; 
and it calls upon you to strike bravely for the loft- 
iest, though unworthy of the lowest. In this way 
a merciful God has been seeking your salvation; 
and yet how have you met these efforts of Divine 
Goodness — these appeals of the gospel to your fears, 
your gratitude, and your hopes ? The cross itself, 
while it tells of a love that ought to melt the most 
obdurate heart, is also a proclamation of wrath 
against those who continue in sin ; and yet you 
listen to it as you would listen to the threats of an 
idiot. God's law seems to have become powerless 
to awaken fear, for while you are capable of being 
startled at the approach of temporal danger, you 
betray an utter insensibility in sight of eternal 
peril. You are capable too of gratitude toward 
your fellow-men, and yet you seem destitute of it 
toward the Giver of all good. While your sympa- 



58 Phil. P. Neeltfs Sermons. 

thies kindle at the kindness of a fellow-creature,' 
they send out no response to the infinite pity and 
compassion and love of God. You are prompt in 
worldly matters to forego the enjoyments of the 
present in view of a larger enjoyment in the future, 
and yet, when the gospel promises eternal blessed- 
ness as the reward of self-denial in time, you madly 
refuse its offer. Fear and gratitude and hope all 
seem dead, and you evince a most unnatural de- 
termination to forget your immortality and to 
live only for this world. While God has offered 
you every possible good, has urged its accept- 
ance by appeals addressed to every, department 
of your constitution, and by considerations 
connected with your immortality, you remain res- 
olutely disobedient and sinful. I appeal to you 
now, and ask, Is not this your attitude before God ? 
And if it is, do not your reason and your conscious- 
ness tell you that you are making void his law — 
are making it utterly impossible for his gospel to 
save you while you remain in this attitude? I want 
you to feel that your disobedience has cut off every 
hope of salvation — has shorn the gospel of all power 
to save you while you continue to be disobedient — 
that you have by this disobedience accumulated a 
burden of guilt which renders your salvation impos- 
sible, and that your only hope now is in Christ. I 
want you to feel that guilt, and to be driven by it 
in penitence to him ; for without penitence and con- 
fession, and a blessed trust, there can be no forgive- 
ness. On these conditions, and these only, pardon 
is suspended, and the fact that they are within the 



Making Void the Law of God. 59 

range of universal compliance should make you 
eager to meet them. 

You stand charged in the text with having made 
void the law of God, and I now leave it to your 
conscience to condemn or acquit you. I have shown 
you that to disobey that law is to make it void, and 
I know that conscience will testify to your disobe- 
dience. The proclamation of your guilt then comes 
from your own souls. You are witnesses against 
yourselves — you are your own accusers ; and my 
prayer to God the Father is that you may never 
rest until your guilt is washed away by the precious 
blood of Christ. 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 

"And when she had so said, she went her way, and called 
Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and call- 
eth for thee." John xi. 28. 

ABOUT two miles from Jerusalem, and situated 
on one of the slopes of the Mount of Olives, 
is the little village of Bethany, where, more than 
eighteen hundred years ago, Jesus the Son of God 
and Saviour of man, who was then tabernacling in 
the flesh, was accustomed to share the hospitality 
of three of his most intimate friends — Lazarus and 
his two sisters, Mary and Martha. 

The modern traveler, on entering this village, 
sees an old ruin called the Castle of Lazarus, which 
tradition says is the house where Lazarus and his 
sisters lived. Not far from the ruin is a sepulcher, 
where it is said he was interred, and which is now 
used by the Turks as an oratory, or place of prayer. 
Near by is the spot where they say the house of 
Mary Magdalene stood, and at the bottom of the 
hill is the Fountain of the Apostles, so called be- 
cause, as tradition goes, they were accustomed to 
stop there and refresh themselves on their frequent 
journeys between Jerusalem and Jericho. 

Whether these traditions be true or not, the little 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 61 

village of Bethany is hallowed ground with Chris- 
tians, because of its historic relation to the earthly 
life of the Incarnate Son of God. It was there that 
he rested when weary. It was there, in a pious 
family, that he illustrated the nature and beauty 
and advantages of sanctified Christian friendship; 
and it was there, and as a part of this illustration, 
that one of his most touching and overwhelming 
miracles was wrought, which was the restoration of 
Lazarus to life after he had been dead four days. 

The text stands connected with that wonderful 
occurrence, and yet it has not been selected with 
any view of entering into a minute examination of 
what is known as the resurrection of Lazarus, the 
circumstances of which are well known to all New 
Testament readers. 

My purpose is to seize upon a few of the most 
suggestive points connected with that event, in the 
hope that they may be made profitable to us who 
love the same Jesus that Martha and Mary loved, 
and whose Christian experience is subject to the 
same trials and variations now that characterized 
theirs then. They had been called to pass through 
a great sorrow, and in that sorrow their hopes had 
gone out after Jesus as their Friend and Helper. In 
his own way, and at a time which, however it may 
have involved a trial of their faith, was after all the 
time best for them and best for him and his great 
redeeming mission, he gave them the needed help. 
As he did then so does he do now. He knows our 
nature more perfectly than we who possess it know 
it, and hence he instructs us more by acting than 



62 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

by teaching. It was so then; it is so now. He 
does not always send us utterances from within the 
veil, but rather in what he does — in those strange 
providences which he sends or permits, and by 
which, now that we have not his bodily presence, 
he passes visibly, and as it were personally, in our 
midst. He seems always to have acted on the prin- 
ciple that while an acquaintance with his system of 
truths is important to us, an acquaintance with him- 
self is still more important. It was this that made 
him act as well as talk during his ministry ; and it is 
this that makes his providences the present and vis- 
ible representations of himself to his people now. 

Martha and Mary, as soon as their brother sick- 
ened, sent to Jesus, saying, " Lord, behold he whom 
thou lovest is sick.'' For good and sufficient rea- 
sons he did not respond immediately to this call of 
suffering friendship. In the meantime the brother 
died, and was buried. Jesus, who knew all things, 
and who needed not to be informed of this sad 
event, announced it to his disciples, and told them 
of his determination to visit the bereaved family. 
Four days after the burial he entered Bethany, and 
was met by Martha, on his way to the house of 
mourning. Passing by their interview for the pres- 
ent, we come at once to the text, where Martha tells 
Mary, who, overwhelmed in sorrow and doubt, had 
not gone with her sister to meet Jesus, that the 
Master had come, and was calling for her. 

There are several things connected with this 
event which to my mind are highly suggestive — 
particularly the coming of Christ to these afflicted 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 63 

and deeply bereaved sisters — "his calling for Mary, 
and the interview that followed. These are the 
points in the narrative to which your attention will 
be directed for a short time. 

" The Master is come, and calleth for thee." This 
coming of Christ, let it be observed now, was in 
answer to prayer. It is not stated in the record 
how long he had been separated from his friends at 
Bethany. We learn, though, that for some time 
previous to the coming of their sorrow he had been 
dwelling in Bethabara, which was on the other side 
of the River Jordan. He was engaged there in his 
work of teaching the people and demonstrating his 
claims to the Messiahship, when the news of his 
friend's illness reached him. It was there that he 
received the request of Mary and Martha that he 
would come to them. It was there, and in the 
midst of his work, that their prayer was laid before 
him. In compliance with their request he had in- 
termitted his labors at Bethabara, had crossed the 
Jordan, and was journeying toward Bethany. He 
does not seem to have hastened to them as soon as 
he heard of their trouble. He set out in that di- 
rection, but he continued to work as he proceeded. 
The prayer from Bethany was born in anxiety and 
sorrow, and it no doubt touched his heart, and 
caused him to start toward Bethany; but the point 
to be remembered is that he did not hasten there. 
He passed through Jericho, and paused long enough 
to restore sight to blind Bartimeusaud to bring sal- 
vation to Zaccheus and his household. Although 
he did not hasten, but took time to do all the work 



64 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons, 

which came in his way, he finally reached Bethany, 
and was in sight of the house of mourning. Now, 
all this is suggestive of several things worthy of our 
remembrance: some things which we do just as 
Mary and Martha did them, and lines of conduct 
which the Master pursues toward us just as he did 
toward them. 

We often ask things of God without ever giving 
one moment's reflection upon the difficulties in the 
way of an immediate answer. We ask thoughtless- 
ly and inconsiderately, without thinking how much 
may have to be done or suffered before what we re- 
quest can be accomplished. We petition for some- 
thing perhaps which requires for its fulfillment ele- 
mental changes in nature, such as the calming of 
seas, the ordering of the winds, the marshaling of 
the clouds, or the directing of the lightnings. At 
other times, what we ask for involves radical changes 
in the hearts and minds of others — changes, too, 
quite out of the ordinary course of things, such as 
the restraining of a Laban, or the softening of an 
Esau. Many times the things we want require the 
putting of restriction upon the powers of darkness, 
in their formidable assaults upon us, or the sending 
upon our feeble strength the reenforcing energies 
of the Holy Ghost. In fact, most of the things 
we ask of God require a power far above our own 
to be exerted before they can be granted. All 
prayer is born in this very human weakness, and is 
offered up to God in an assumed recognition of the 
fact that he has the power to supplement and per- 
fect this weakness. This fact should make us 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 65 

thoughtful and considerate in all our askings, and 
should imbue our hearts and minds with sentiments 
of profoundest gratitude when our requests are 
granted. 

Another thought, suggested by the coming of 
Jesus to these sorrowing sisters, is that the Master 
always looks at the thoughts and desires of the 
heart rather than at the words we use in prayer. 
The words of Mary and Martha were, "Lord, he 
whom thou lovest is sick." Now, these were very 
proper words, but they carried up a very improper 
thought; and that thought was that the Master must 
leave off every other engagement, lay aside every 
other work, and come immediately to them ; and 
that unless he did this, he could do them no good. 
This thought was highly objectionable on two 
grounds. First, it was selfish, and meant that they 
must be cared for in their sorrow, no matter how 
many blind men should thereby have to be neglected. 
In the next place, it was unbelieving, and in that re- 
spect dishonoring to the divine nature of Christ. It 
seemed to forget that he was God, and that sight 
was not necessary to his knowledge. It did not 
consider that as God he could not only know that 
their brother was sick, but do all that Omnipotence 
could do, while yet afar off, just as well as if he 
were by the sick man's couch. Therefore, their 
thoughts came far short of the noble faith of the 
Roman soldier, who said to Jesus: " Lord, I am not 
worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof; 
but speak the word only, and my servant shall be 
healed." But notwithstanding all these defects, the 
5 



66 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

Master saw fit to answer their request by coming; 
and this is suggestive of his willingness to help us, 
not according to our worthiness to be helped, but 
according to his infinite compassion — not only when 
all our thoughts are perfect, but also despite the 
selfishness and ignorance and unbelief from which 
it is so difficult for us to become entirely free. We 
see too in the manner of his coming an illustration 
of his sovereignty. He came, it is true, but not as 
they thought he would come, as to time and man- 
ner. Instead of coming at once, he delays and ar- 
rives only to find his friend in the grave and the 
sisters in the deepest grief. They had asked him 
to come to Bethany, and he is there; but the time 
has gone by when they had expected him, and now 
that he is there they gather but comparatively small 
comfort from his presence because of the weakness 
of their faith. This, I say, was an illustration of 
our Lord's sovereignty; yet we must not think that 
in this, or in any thing else, our Lord can be justly 
chargeable with a capricious exercise of sovereignty 
He often delays to do what is asked, yet it is always 
for good reasons. It is always because the thing 
asked for ought not then to be given, or because 
the petitioners are not yet prepared to receive it 
with profit. The case under review shows this. 
Look at it now. Suppose that he, by a simple ex- 
ercise of his divine power, had healed Lazarus 
without leaving Bethabara; or suppose that, in 
consideration of their anxiety and the defectiveness 
of their faith, he had gone immediately to Bethany, 
and by an exercise of his miraculous power had 



Jesas and the Sisters at Bethany. 67 

restored the sick man to perfect health in a moment, 
as Mary and Martha evidently desired and^expected 
him to do. In either instance, it would have been 
only another of those ordinary works to which he 
was devoting* himself, and by which he was" stamp- 
ing his wondrous life with divinity. But by delay- 
ing the time of his arrival he prepared the* way for 
an extraordinary | manifestation of that divinity. 
This delay, instead of being a mere caprice of sov- 
ereignty, had a noble purpose that fully justified 
him, and which is a complete vindication of him 
against the charge of insensibility to the claims of 
friendship. By delay, the emergency had time to 
deepen and ripen, and an arena was prepared by 
it for a more illustrious and commanding manifes- 
tation of his power and grace than could possibly 
have been made in either of the instances just re- 
ferred to. It furnished an ample opportunity for 
him to enter the"",' lists with death and the grave, 
and to openly and~ gloriously triumph over them 
before his own temporary subjection to their power. 
Look too at the good results by which this delay 
was to be followed. It became the means of con- 
firming his disciples in the faith by which they were 
to conquer the, world. It was an exhibition of pow- 
er before which the unbelief of the' people gave way. 
Yea, it was this great'miracle, wrought in the vicin- 
ity of Jerusalem, their stronghold, that precipitated 
the counsels of the rulersand priesthood, in regard 
to his death. These were some of the momentous 
consequences of delay in answering prayer in this 
instance, and they summon us to wait patiently un- 



68 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

der the delays which may mark God's course as to 
our supplications in this day. If, when we send 
out our longing desires after him in the day of 
trouble, he does not hasten to our relief, let us not 
think him indifferent to our sorrows, or unable to 
comfort us. We must learn from this incident to 
pray on and faint not. If the promise tarry, we 
must wait for it in patience and in hope. When 
you shake the tree by prayer and the fruit does not 
fall at once, instead of being discouraged you must 
take it for granted that the fruit is not ripe and wait 
until it is. But the tardy coming of Christ to the 
mourning household at Bethany teaches us how 
severe a trial it is to have our askings followed by 
delay on the part of the great Giver. This delay 
is always an ordeal, and there are but few persons 
that get through it without sin. When these sisters 
found that Jesus did not come to their help as soon 
as he received their prayer, they counted it as lost — 
as wasted breath, and as useless labor. It is true, 
when, after their brother was dead and in his grave, 
Jesus drew near to Bethany, Martha went out to 
meet him; but she went with a cold, sorrowing, 
hopeless heart in her bosom. The words with 
which she greeted him — " Lord, if thou hadst been 
here, my brother had not died" — were the echo of a 
vanished hope, the ashes of a dead faith. It was as 
though she had said: " You could have shielded us 
from this terrible calamity, but you would not: and 
now it is too late, for he is dead and buried." Jesus 
came under a conscionsness that he had done all for 
the best; and this, coupled with the knowledge 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 69 

that she would soon see and acknowledge that even 
his delay was in wisdom and goodness, made him 
oblivious to the cutting reproach which her words 
conveyed. Instead of rebuking her for her want of 
faith, he proceeds at once to the work of attempt- 
ing to rekindle the dying flame by saying to her, 
"Thy brother shall rise again." But the poor 
mourner's sun of faith is too much in eclipse to ap- 
prehend his meaning. Her heart is in the grave 
where they have laid her brother. Her only thought 
is that he is dead, that a heavy stone shuts him from 
her loving eyes, and that corruption has already be- 
gun to mar the flesh on which she had but a few 
days before gazed so fondly. Her lips move, and 
she answers, "I know that he shall rise again in the 
resurrection at the last day." Her grasp was upon 
this last plank left for the surviving love in the 
shipwreck that death brings — the final resurrec- 
tion. To this the God-man calmly replies, " I am 
the resurrection and the life," which was as if 
he had said, "In me is all life, so that even now 
I have the power to restore your brother to 
that life from which death has released him." He 
challenges her faith by the question, "Believ- 
est thou this?" to which her mourning trust re- 
sponds, "Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the 
Christ the Son of God, which should come into the 
world." For a moment her faith seems about to re- 
cover itself, to arise from the dust into which delay 
had cast it. "I know," she cried out, "that even 
now whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will 
give it thee!" In this cry, though, she shows that 



70 Phil. P. JSeely's Sermons. 

her trust in Christ is only secondary — that she does 
not center her hopes in him primarily, but in God, 
and in him the Son only as he might have access to 
the Father by prayer. Her faith was vague, when 
it should have been distinct, direct, and undoubting; 
and instead of laying hold upon the consolation of- 
fered, it wavered and turned backward toward dark- 
ness and unbelief. Her soul was troubled, and in 
its trouble fluctuated with alternate emotions. Like 
a ship in a storm, she in one moment seemed to 
bound up to the very gate^of heaven, and in the 
next moment seemed almost ingulfed inthe abyss 
of despair ; and in all this alternation [she stood as 
a type of the millions who since then have been 
tempest-tossed and tempest-driven by the slowness 
with which, and for their good too, God gives an- 
swers to human prayers. O it is so hard to trust 
him when he tarries! It is so natural for us to 
think that the prayer which is not answered in the 
moment of its going up is lost; and yet how trying 
to the Master must all this be ! Amid it all, though, 
he goes straight on in his way, neither overleaping 
nor putting aside the obstacles which cross his path. 
O brethren, this is grace ! This is that love that 
goes on in well-doing though it meet only with evil. 
This is that love which human weakness never pro- 
vokes, and which human ignorance never wearies. 
It suffers long, and is always kind. It is the love 
which but one, and only one, has fully and un- 
changingly exhibited; and that one is Christ the 
Saviour of sinners. In his great name, and as his 
representative, and by his authority and life. I dare 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 71 

to tell you that if you have opened the door for 
him by prayer, be sure that he will come to you, 
even as he came to the sisters at Bethany, notwith- 
standing your many failings and your innumerable 
short-comings. 

But we pass from the conversation of Martha with 
Jesus to the summons which he sends to Mary, 
after he was actually come, notwithstanding his 
long delay. The language of Martha was, "The 
Master is come, and calleth for thee." 

Mary was constitutionally unlike her sister. Mar 
tha was quick, impulsive, and eager to act. Mary 
was slow, thoughtful, meditative, and less excitable 
Like Martha, she had requested Christ to come, 
had expected him to come, and had been disappoint- 
ed that he did not come at once; but unlike Martha, 
she could not suddenly recover from the disappoint- 
ment. She perhaps was last to lose confidence in 
him, and last to recover it after it had once been 
shaken. It is more than probable that she more 
fully than Martha believed that he would come ; 
and hence, when doubt was once planted in the soil 
of her quiet, loving, meditative soul, it took deeper 
root than it did in the shallow soil of her sister's 
more superficial nature. I hold that it was far 
easier for Martha to recover her lost confidence 
than Mary, and that it was this instinctive knowl- 
edge which Jesus possessed of this difference in 
their characters that caused him to call especially 
for Mary. He knew how entirely her reflective 
mind had trusted in him, how entirely she had 
loved him, how confidently she had asked him to 



72 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

come to tliem in their great trouble, how undoubt- 
ingly she had day after day expected him, and how 
utterly overwhelmed by despair her poor stricken 
and disappointed soul was when she saw that her 
brother was dead — dead too because of the absence 
of Him she loved, and who alone could have kept 
him alive. it is agony supreme, it is wretched- 
ness beyond expression, for a nature of this kind to 
trust and be disappointed. It is so in the common 
friendships of life, and the agony is increased a 
hundred-fold when God is the object of doubt. 
The soul then becomes a captive, and sits in loneli- 
ness and solitude, bound in coils of its own weaving. 
It is utterly bereft of consolation, for it has separat- 
ed itself from the fountain of all comfort. Without 
faith it becomes only a prisoner of hope— a hope too 
that has no place of anchorage, that is adrift upon 
a stormy sea, with no holding place amid the tem- 
pest. This was the condition of Mary as she sat 
there in sorrow over her loss, and in bitter remem- 
brance that He whom she had so entirely trusted 
had failed her in the great hour of her suffering and 
need. 

But Jesus was not unmindful of her. Although 
she refused to go forth with Martha to meet him, 
and showed by her stony, listless manner that her 
faith in him was gone, he did not forsake her. He 
had compassion on her poor blind soul, which re- 
fused to see unless with the eye of sense; and as 
she would not come voluntarily, as her more im- 
pulsive sister had, he called for her, determined 
that she should be an eye-witness to what would 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 73 

be not only a proof of his friendship, but a demon- 
stration of his divinity. Here, brethren, was grace — 
infinite, condescending grace — in the absence of all 
fitness or worthiness in the object to receive it. 
And how often has he manifested this grace to us 
in our doubts and fears ! We sometimes sit still in 
our sorrow when our bounding feet should be seek- 
ing him; and yet, in our unworthy distrust, he oft- 
en condescends to call us. His voice comes to us 
in his Word, in his Spirit, and in his providences, as 
distinctly as it came to Mary through the lips of 
her sister, saying, " The Master is come, and calleth 
for thee." 

Let us pass now from the call to the meeting of 
Mary and the Master whom she doubted. 

There she sat, in her silent grief and stony agony, 
nursing her sorrow, and raising around her shadows 
of unbelief which cut off all consolation ; but as soon 
as she received the Master's summons, she arose 
and came to him at once, and her prompt obedi- 
ence was followed, as obedience always is, by im- 
mediate relief. Martha having found comfort in 
the words of Jesus, was anxious that Mary should 
find it also. In the fullness of her heart she went 
back to the solitary mourner, and said, "The Mas- 
ter is come, and calleth for thee." That was 
enough. The poor doubter knew then that she was 
not entirely forgotten, nor utterly forsaken. "As 
soon as she heard it ' ? — that is, the summons — " she 
arose quickly, and came unto him." The spell is 
broken at once, and the prisoner of hope is free — 
made free by the simple word of her Lord and 



74 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

Master. How suggestive this is of the power of 
that precious Word to remove our doubts and to 
comfort us in our sorrows, even as the word of 
Christ did for Mary! Her trouble was inward, and 
she had borne it silently. It had led her down into 
the worst of all bondage — the bondage of fear and 
doubt. The cords of a great temptation were 
tightening around her, and it was at a moment 
when she was struggling in the hot clutches of de- 
spair that the word of her Lord brought deliver- 
ance. His summons too was only the beginning ot 
the goodness he had in store for her, as the nar- 
rative shows. 

They passed from the place of meeting to the 
grave ; and as they stood there, the great Sorrow- 
bearer of humanity mingled his tears with Mary's. 
Ah, how those precious drops testified to the depth 
of his sympathy ! and how completely they vindi- 
cated him against the doubts that Mary had cher- 
ished! Even the spectators were affected by the 
scene, and said, " Behold how he loved him!" 
Those tears of her sympathizing Lord washed out 
her last lingering doubt and fear, and prepared her 
for that fullness of joy which she felt when at the 
word of the Lord her brother was brought back to 
life and to the love of his sorrowing sisters. 

Their prater was answered, but not as they had 
expected. It was answered in his own divine way — 
that is, exceeding abundantly above all that they 
asked or thought. 

In their great trouble they had applied to him for 
help. He had seen fit to delay his answer to this 



Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 75 

call. This delay they had failed to understand, and 
had fostered feelings of bitterness and distrust to- 
ward him. In the face of all these suspicions he 
had gone on, working out his ministry of love in 
his own way ; and now, as they sit there in their 
happy home listening to the tones of their risen 
brother's voice, or drinking in lessons of heavenly 
wisdom from the lips of their wonder-working 
Friend, Jesus of Nazareth, the measure of their 
faith and joy more than compensated for their 
doubts and sorrows when that brother had sickened 
and died. 

This whole narrative suggests the fact that when 
our emergencies are greatest, divine help may be 
expected to be most abundant. Our emergencies 
are like streams crossing the traveler's path ; some 
are small, and may be passed without much difficulty ; 
others are large — are swollen by sorrow — have 
spread out over the banks, and bring us to a pause, 
like that which arrested Martha and Mary in their 
Bethany home. In these great emergencies, our 
only hope is in God. In these times of trouble, we 
should go out to him in prayer; yet when we send 
for him, it should be in trust and with a firm pur- 
pose to hold fast our confidence, even should he 
tarry awhile ; for the Scriptures furnish us many 
examples to show us his delays are often his great- 
est mercies. He often hides his face for a time, 
and our past experiences, if we will only turn to 
them in sorrows, assure us that his hidings are as 
full of love as his manifested presence. When our 
way is intercepted by smaller streams, he sends us 



76 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

his precious promises as so many boats to bear us 
across the raging waters. We must have that trust 
that will constrain us to commit ourselves to these 
boats, and that will make us courageous as we look 
out upon the threatening elements. We must obey 
his voice, as Mary did. That will or word tells us 
that although we may neither see nor hear him, he is 
never "far from us at any time." 

I thank God, brethren, that our God is every- 
where, and that it is possible for a true faith to 
recognize his hand and presence in every event of 
life. It is this faith in him, whether he is present 
or absent, that makes his children tranquil and 
hopeful in every state and condition of life. They 
know him, and this knowledge gives them confi- 
dence, an ever-increasing confidence, in him. And 
as they that go down upon the deep and are over- 
mastered by storms in the darkness of the night, 
knowing not on what strange shores they may be 
thrown, cast anchor and wait for the day, so, in the 
midst of trial and temptation, when the storm is 
fierce and the night is dark, when the lights are 
quenched and the signals gone, his children can at 
least cast anchor; and they may know too that if 
they wait in faith and hope for the day, it will surely 
dawn. there never was a night so long that the 
day did not overtake it; there never was a morn- 
ing without its morning-star; there never was a 
day without a sun. In these dark, tempestuous 
nights do not despair, but wait for the morning 
with its beautiful star and shining sun. 

When trouble enters your home, as it entered the 












Jesus and the Sisters at Bethany. 77 

home at Bethany, send messages to the faithful 
Friend ; for he loves you. If he come not at once, 
listen to the whisperings of Faith, who will tell you 
that although he tarries he loves you. If you hear 
his voice calling you, go quickly and meet him; for 
he loves you, and calls you but to comfort you as 
he did Mary — exceeding abundantly above all that 
you can ask or think. 



The Need of Religion 



" But one thing is needful ; and Mary hath chosen that good 
part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke x. 42. 

THE discourse this morning was on the nature 
of religion as the one great need of humanity. 
Religion, or a religious state, was denned as a con- 
dition of absolute dependence on, of perfect trust 
in, and of constant communion with God; and the 
object of the discourse was to explain and enforce 
these terms. I propose this evening to address you 
on the need of religion. Our Lord speaks of it as 
the one needed thing of life. "But one thing is 
needful," is his language. 

It was a need so great, so pressing, and so all- 
embracing and immediate, as to leave no other want 
of humanity worthy of being called a need, in his 
estimation. He seemed to think that for a man to 
contemplate this in its true significance and impor- 
tance, would cause him to forget his minor wants, 
and to neglect every thing else until this demand 
of his soul, and that for all eternity too, was fully 
and satisfyingly met. And yet — alas that it should 
be so ! — the great majority of persons leave this to 
the last. They will not recognize its importance. 
They will not solemnly ponder the necessity of re- 






The Need of Religion. 79 

ligion — their need of it not only when they get 
sick or are about to die, bat now, while in health, 
and us the great regulator and sweetener of life. 
Especially are the young thoughtless at this point. 
They think of religion as of something opposed to 
their happiness, and therefore not to be cultivated 
until the bright days of youth have mellowed into 
the summer of manhood, or become tinged with 
the fading hues of autumn, or whitened with the 
frosts of winter. Then, say they — when the silver 
cord is being loosened, and the golden bowl is about 
to be broken — then we will cultivate the solemnities 
of religion and make preparation for eternity. 

I tried to show you this morning that religion was 
happiness instead of gloom ; that it was liberty in- 
stead of bondage; that it was the only thing that 
could bring security and satisfaction to young and 
old. I come to-night to dwell on its necessity ; and 
may God our Father open your hearts to my mes- 
sage, and make it as the winning chimes of an 
angel's song to these young, listening souls ! 

And now, in dwelling on this great need of hu- 
manity, I shall not pause to consider the connection 
between religion and the prosperity of a nation, 
although the question is one of momentous interest, 
and its discussion, under other circumstances, might 
be profitable. Neither shall I inquire into the moral 
necessity of religion, as a remedial scheme for 
human salvation; for I take it for granted that you 
all admit this. 

My purpose is to consider the demands which 
every human heart has for religion in this present 



80 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

life, our need of it now, and all through life as the 
great factor in the system of human happiness and 
usefulness and safety. I want to show that you 
need it in the regulation of your passions, in the 
training of your minds, in the cultivation of your 
affections, and in preparing yourselves for the life 
that now is and for the life to come. I want to 
show you that in this sense we all need it, but that 
in these respects it is especially needed by the 
young, and that for them to neglect it is to make 
life a final failure, and eternity an unending agony. 
I shall therefore address myself first to them. 

In you, my young friends, and at your age, sus- 
ceptibility and imagination predominate over reason 
and reflection. It is the season of impulse, the age 
of thoughtlessness. It is true, passion has not yet 
matured into the ripeness and tyranny which it 
often gains over persons more advanced in life ; 
but it has more of freshness, more of impatience, 
and is therefore more difficult to restrain. You 
have not yet learned from experience the fatal effects 
of sinful indulgence, and are therefore without the 
caution that experience teaches. You have not 
even fully learned the vanity of human hopes, the 
falseness of so much that seems fair, and the dis- 
appointments with which human life abounds. Life 
has been passed by you amid a succession of beauti- 
ful illusions, each of which wore to your young, 
trusting natures the seeming of reality. 

Ah! it is indeed the golden season of the soul, 
this season of youth ; and as I sometimes look at 
the young, and see them so innocent of ill, so con- 



The Need of Religion. 81 

fiding in affection, and so hopeful of good — as I 
mingle with them, and look upon the blushing cheek 
and beaming eye; as I hear your glad voices and wit- 
ness your wild ebullience of joy, so fraught with im- 
pulse, and so like the songs of birds in spring — I catch 
the illusion, and feel as if "I were a boy again." 
Ah ! well do I remember the season when, like many 
now before me, I stood upon the portals of life's 
beautiful temple, and gazed yearningly adown its un- 
trodden aisles — when, like theyouth in Cole's picture 
of the voyage of life, I stood upon the vessel, as it 
floated on in the morning sunshine, straining the 
vision and stretching the arm toward the distant 
temple of honor and hope. I have not forgotten 
the banks all covered with flowers, and the hills all 
tinted with vermillion, which so filled me with 
gladness then. These things are as fresh in my 
memory to-night as though they were of yester- 
day; and it is this memory that saddens me, as I 
look upon you, my young friends, and think that in 
the absence of religion many of you will be doomed 
to weep when you might have smiled, and to mourn 
when you might have rejoiced. 

that I could persuade you to draw your happi- 
ness in the moruing of life from that fountain which 
never runs dry! that I could influence you to 
put away that infatuation which tells you to post- 
pone your return to God until your earthly hopes 
are dead, and age, with its infirmities, is upon you ! 
How can you, with so much to awaken your grat- 
itude and bind you to God, put him away from 
your thoughts and live for a world which will con- 
6 



82 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

tinually mock and deceive you ? and yet this is the 
choice that some of you have made, and in which 
you seem content. And above all, how can woman 
— she whose organization seems so exquisitely at- 
tuned to religion, and whose very helplessness in- 
vites it — how can she, whose very nature is love, 
withhold her heart when the holy and infinite God 
demands it? To me, the saddest of all spectacles 
is a worldly, irreligious woman ; and the sadness 
deepens when the subject of it is young. 

Let me give you a picture; and the picture is not 
all fancy, for there are those here who g*ve it reality. 
There before me is a young maiden with the glow 
of summer's dawn upon her cheek, with the bright- 
ness of heaven's sun upon her brow, and the depth 
of heaven's starlight in her eyes. There she is, 
with the gladness of innocent maidenhood in her 
heart, or it may be the lights and shadows, the 
ecstasies and sorrows of approaching womanhood 
flitting athwart her bosom in visions of dreamy, 
undefined, but most impassioned prophesies. I see 
her going forth in the early morning to her school 
tasks, with a step so light that it scarcely bends the 
flowers beneath her feet. I see her again in the 
school-room, smoothing back the truant ringlet 
from her brow and poring over her lessons, yet 
dreaming wildly of the tinted future. Behold her 
again as she glides through the mazes of the 
dance, with step so graceful yet so vital, or as 
she moves amid the endearments of home and the 
sanctities of friendship — so calm in countenance, 
so simple in manner, yet so profound in feeling, so 



The Need of Religion. 83 

fathomless in enthusiasm, so little comprehended 
by others, and such a mysterj 7 even to herself. 
Behold her in all these phases of life, and ask 
yourself, Can it be possible that one so full of hope, 
yet so exposed to danger, and so destined to change, 
can consent to lavish the first, fresh fragrance of 
her life on sin and self, and then, when the festal 
lights have ceased to burn, and the music that once 
charmed falls dead upon the heart, will come and 
offer herself, a miserable bankrupt, to Him who had 
flooded her young life with so much of sunshine ? 

For woman to do this is to belie her tenderness, 
her gratitude, her whole loving nature; it is to 
make her an iugrate, a thing to be shunned and 
abhorred, because of the perversion of her very or- 
ganization, which is essentially religious. 

what is woman ? what her smile, 

Her lips of love, her eyes of light? 
What is she if her lips revile 

Her dying Lord ? 

Love may write 
His name upon her marble brow, 

May linger in her curls of jet; 
The bright spring grass may scarcely bow 

Beneath her feet; and yet, 
Without that meeker grace, she is 
A lighter thing than vanity." 

I tell you all that religion, if ever needed, is 
needed in your youth-time — is needed especially by 
those of you who have known but little of care 
and sorrow. Possessed as you are with impulsive 
natures, and urged on by sensibility and imagina- 
tion, what, I ask, is more needful to prevent a ship- 



84 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

wreck of your hopes than the serenity of religion, 
the sobriety and steadiness of deep-founded prin- 
ciple, the strong and lofty aim of imperishable 
virtue? 

And if religion be so necessary to those who 
know neither care nor sorrow, how much more 
needful is it to the young who have found life, even 
in its beginning, thronged with troubles? The sea- 
son of youth is not always a time of undisturbed 
happiness. It has its disappointments, its bitter 
jealousies, its broken friendships; its cold treat- 
ment — sometimes from kindred, and at home ; its 
chains of restraint and of poverty, of dependence 
and toil ; its conscious mediocrity ; its failure to 
share the prizes which, held out to ambition, are 
seized and borne off by others; and with these 
comes the crushing thought that either for want of 
fortune, or talent, or distinguished parentage, or 
beauty, the meed of admiration for which all young 
souls yearn is withheld. The feelings become mor- 
bid. They feel that no one cares for them ; that 
even parents are cold and distant and hard ; that 
they are not appreciated as they deserve to be. 

This is a common state of mind with young men 
who come to the city to earn their bread by honest 
toil. A sensation of loneliness possesses them. 
Next comes a feeling of disquiet. Persuaded that 
nobody cares for them, they cease to care for them- 
selves, and are found yielding little by little to the 
seductive wiles of the tempter. Cut loose almost 
entirely from society, and from religious influences, 
they are left without power to resist temptation. 



The Need of Religion. 85 

They soon become reckless, and with no cords of 
kindly sympathy to hold them back, they plunge at 
last into the wildest dissipation and profligacy, and 
are soon lost to all good and dead to all virtue. 

Is not this the history of many a young man of 
high promise in early life? Cannot some of you here 
to-night recall just such a history — a history which 
began in joy, but ended in fearful tragedy? Young 
man, may not this be your history? " One thing" 
is needed; and without that one essential conser- 
vator of character, the chances for a safe conduct 
through your youth-time are all against you. O 
hear my counsel and ponder my warning! If you 
give yourself up to the guidance of passion and 
appetite ; if, from love of sin, you renounce prayer 
and yield yourself to a life of sensual enjoyment; 
if you refuse to take the Word of God as your di- 
rectory, and the restraints of religion as your pro- 
tection — you will find the conflicting passions of 
your nature and the severe temptations from with- 
out by which you will be assailed more than you 
can resist. The foundations of your hopes of use- 
fulness and happiness will be uptorn, and your life 
will prove as the light of a wandering star, going 
out at last amid the blackness of despair and the 
darkness of desolation. 

you need religion both in the joyous hours and 
in the weeping-time of youth. Nothing else can 
safely guide you, can adjust and harmonize your 
nature, can make your lives grand and blessed, and 
finally conduct you to the bosom of God. "One 
thing is needful." O that I could persuade you all 



86 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

to seek that one thing before the time comes when 
"the evil days and the years draw nigh," and you 
will say, " I have no pleasure in them ! " 

But religion is no less needed in manhood and 
womanhood than in youth. This may be regarded 
as the midway stand-point of human life. In youth, 
we have eyes only for what is in the future. At 
that period we have no past, except childhood, 
which, because of its blankness, fails to arrest our 
attention. Our gaze, therefore, is all upon what is 
to come. It is different, though, in middle life. 
We look then both forward and backward — into 
our future and past. We subdue our anticipations 
of the future by recurring to our experience in the 
past, thus checking what in youth would have hur- 
ried us on unresistingly. We still hope, but our 
hope has less of enthusiasm than once. In youth, 
the light of hope falls around us with the freshness 
and sparkle of the morning sun ; in middle life, it 
comes to us as the light of sunshine falling through 
the stained glass of some vast cathedral, and shed- 
ding a mournful beauty around chancel and altar. 

If life up to that period has been, as it has with 
many, fraught with disappointment, with lack of 
success in business, with failure in our plans and 
hopes, or with want of appreciation ; if the man 
has trusted and been deceived; if his early visions, 
like the hues of the rainbow, have grown dim and 
at last faded, leaving him only the cold, leaden 
sky ; if he has suffered and yearned for sympathy, 
but failed to find it even where he of right expected 
it — thus circumstanced, if he is without that resig- 



The Need of Religion. 87 

nation which a firm trust in God gives, he will fall 
into a bitter, distrustful spirit, fatal to all happiness 
here and all hope hereafter. 

But suppose he has been successful in life. Does 
that diminish his danger, or make religion less need- 
ful? No. If a man is successful in worldly ac- 
cumulation, in the pursuit of honor, or in the de- 
visal of additional elegances or luxuries for the 
aesthetic or sensual nature, his very successes only 
increase his desire for more. With this increased 
desire comes a diminished condition of conscience, 
and as a consequence, less simple as to how he can 
add new supplies to his store. His thoughts be- 
come more worldly, his affections more earthly, his 
sensibilities more blunted, and his conscience more 
hardened, until, for want of a deeply implanted and 
controlling religious principle, God is finally de- 
throned from his soul, heaven is abjured in his prac- 
tice, and self is set up as the worshiped divinity. 

But I will suppose — for I want to meet every pos- 
sible case before me — I will suppose, I say, that 
success has not made him selfish and unprincipled, 
and I contend that even that will not make religion 
less necessary to him as a means of happiness. I 
hold that from the very fact that he has retained 
his sensibility and conscience unimpaired, he is 
more in need of religion as a source of happiness 
than if he were less noble in nature, and, as a con- 
sequence, less susceptible of remorse for wrong- 
doing. Let us contemplate him in this character 
for a moment. There he is — the favored child of 
fortune — a successful, honorable, yet worldly man. 



88 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

In the midst of his most brilliant successes he re- 
calls the feeliugs which former successes brought 
him, and remembers how little solid happiness they 
ever secured. As he looks out upon some new en- 
terprise to which he is invited, he says, " What 
though I succeed? Suppose I could add millions 
to my wealth, or bind my brow with newer and 
fresher garlands, or fill my cup of pleasure with a 
brighter and more sparkling nectar. What real 
good will it all bring? What great aspiration will 
it supply ? Will it not all be, as it has been before, 
the plaything of an hour, the joy of a moment, to 
be succeeded as others were by satiety and dis- 
gust? " 

Ah, what a cheerless light do successes in wealth, 
in ambition, and in pleasure kindle for such a man ! 
How his heart grows old and weary, and almost dead, 
amid all his acquisitions ! These very acquisitions, 
if they find him without God and without hope, wear 
to him in his thoughtful hours a mournful shadow. 
He knows that in a little while he must give them 
all up, and that in the life to come they can buy for 
him neither peace nor blessedness. 

Ah ! say what you will, but the soul is lonely with- 
out religion — lonely in the midst of all its worldly 
abundance. O the soul — the immortal soul — what 
is it? and what can make it happy? It is a deep, 
unsounded abyss. What line can fathom it ? It is 
a stormy, midnight chaos. What light can dispel 
its gloom ? It is a vast prison-house, voiced with 
groans and sobbing agonies. What power can still 
these groans and hush these agonies ? Where, 



The Need of Religion. 89 

where, can the immortal and burdened soul turn for 
rest? 

Let the past answer, and with united voice, it 
says, " Turn to God for rest." This answer comes 
from the charnel-house of buried centuries. The 
dead give it from the dust of their old graves. 
could the millions who have gone to the tomb awake 
and speak to you to-night, with skeleton fingers 
they would point upward, and sa}', " Turn to God 
for happiness!" Separated from him, the soul is 
dark — darker than would be the universe without 
a sun. Take the day-god from his throne of fire, 
and what would be the result ? 

The stars 
Would wander darkling in the eternal space, 
Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth would 
Swing blind and black' ning in the moonless air. 

The clouds would perish, the very winds would 
wither, and the universe itself be turned to dark- 
ness. But darker and more desolate still is the soul 
without God, with no Father, no home, no heaven; 
and this is the awful gloom which many of you are 
inviting. "One thing is needful." It is needed 
now — needed in your youth, needed in your man- 
hood, and will be needed by your forever. O that 
you would all seek it, and that you would seek it 
now ! 

If, now, religion be necessary to the safety and 
happiness of the young, and if, as I have shown, it 
be essential to the security and comfort of the mid- 
dle-aged, who can doubt its importance to the old ? 
I need not argue this point, for you all admit it. 



90 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

The young and the middle-aged may be so beguiled 
by pleasure and immersed in business as to fail to 
recognize their present interest in this subject; but 
if you ask them what they think of it in its rela- 
tions to old people, they will all say, with one 
accord : " Yes, the aged ought to attend to it — ought 
to have religion as their stay and comfort amid the 
stumbling and perishing of life." And it is true. 

To me, there is something sad beyond all expres- 
sion in the spectacle of old age unsolaced by a hope 
of heaven. Let us look at such a man for a moment. 
He may be here to-night. If so, may God's Spirit 
touch his heart, while I try to draw his picture as 
it is. 

There he stands — the old, irreligious, world- 
weary man. The goal of manhood was long since 
reached and passed. The fires of his youth have 
died out, leaving only the gray, smoldering embers. 
The pulses beat faint and low. The blood, which 
once went bounding through his veins, now creeps 
languidly to the heart, and is sent feebly back from 
the citadel to the outposts. The limbs have grown 
tremulous, and the frame tottering. The eye has 
retreated into its cavernous depths, and burns with 
a pale, dim light; while the poor, palsied body 
bends earthward, as if instinctively meeting the 
dust with which it is soon to mingle. The friends 
of his youth are all dead, and he moves the last, 
perhaps, of his generation. His wife is among the 
silent sleepers, and the most of his children lie 
with folded hands in scattered church-yards. The 
lengthening shadows, as they fall mournfully around, 






The Need of Religion. 91 

tell that the orb of his life has almost reached the 
sunset hour. The few kindred left him watch the 
retiring light as it purples the gathering clouds, 
with a longing desire to stay its departure; but it 
wanes and wanes, and must soon drop, like a spark, 
and go out in the ocean of eternity. There he 
stands on the dividing summit between time and 
eternity, and is about to pass it to return no more 
forever. Memories of the green vale that lies far 
back in his youth-time come to him now like the 
faint echoes of music that is flown. Thoughts of 
the companions who walked with him in that beau- 
tiful season wander dreamily through his mind. 
Snatches of songs sung in the olden time come 
back as the chimes of far-off bells. He looks back 
upon the hills up which, in company with the com- 
panions of his youth, he toiled ; and mournful now 
is the remembrance that in climbing them he spent 
the best energies of his life — seeking what men 
call wealth and distinction, but which have proved 
to him but bubbles on the wave. 

These seasons, these friends, these hopes, are gone 
— all gone — and there the old man stands, deserted 
of all when most in need of help. There he is, 
separated from the sympathies of the living, linked 
only with a dead generation — dying himself, with 
no religion, no interest in Jesus, no hope of heaven. 
Where, I ask, can the imagination summon a pict- 
ure more gloomy, more miserable, more absolutely 
and hopelessly wretched ? There he stands, at the 
very portal of eternity, with no heavenly guide to 
conduct him to where 



92 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

Withered age may bloom again, 

Bright through the eternal years of God. 

What is such a man but a wreck upon the surf- 
beaten shore of life — a ruin on the beetling cliffs of 
time, tottering to its fall, and soon to be ingulfed 
forever ? 

And now, my dear friends, my task is nearly 
ended. It only remains for me to urge you to 
choose this " one thing needful," and to tell you that 
it is the only abiding thing in time and in eternity. 
It is that good part which shall not be taken away 
from us. It will stay with us amid the changes of 
this sorrowful life — making us rich in our poverty 
and giving us comfort in our troubles ; and it is the 
only thing that will abide with us in the awful hour 
of death. 

I want something that will stay with me then, 
something on which I can lean my feeble soul in 
that fearful hour, something that will shelter the 
poor, unhoused spirit when it goes out upon its 
unknown and endless journey ! 

friends, it is a sad thing to die, even when 
death comes to conduct us to the bosom of God. 
To leave this goodly world; to look no more on its 
shining sun, its silent stars, and its all-embracing 
sky ; to tread no more its green valleys, nor listen 
to the voices of its birds, nor feel the soft breath of 
its summer winds ; to leave the friends with whom 
we have been so happy — the friends so tried and 
true — and our children, whom we love more than we 
love life ; to give up all — God's beautiful world and 
the loved ones of our hearts — and go down into the 



The Need of Religion. 93 

long, dreamy night of death — this, this is sad- 
ness ! 

It is a solemn thing to die ; to feel that the wheels 
of life are pausing ; to have to struggle for breath ; 
gaze with open, glassy eyes into darkness; to have 
the windows of the soul thrown wide open, and yet 
lor there to come no light; to hear the broken sob 
and wailing cry of some heart that is breaking be- 
cause we are going ; to grapple with a cold, icy 
shadow; to hear the waving of dreadful wings, 
with no power to escape them ; to feel a leaden 
weight upon the heart, curdling its blood and still- 
ing its pulses until all is cold and still and rigid ; 
and then, clad in our grave-clothes and coffined, to 
be borne to the city of silence and laid low, with 
no companion or friend — nothing but stillness and 
the worm ; to be left there alone, even by our chil- 
dren, who in a little while will not so much as come 
from the festival of life and drop a tear or plant a 
flower over our dust. 

friends, it is an awful thing to die; to pass 
from life, from probation, from privileges, into the 
Eternal Presence, where in a moment our destiny 
will be eternally and changelessly fixed, with God 
or with the damned. At such a moment, what ages 
of suspense the soul lives; and O how it longs then 
for some word of promise, some voice stealing down 
from the far-away heaven, assuring it of a better 
life — telling it, " Fear not, but come ; for this is thy 
home, and here are thy friends." 

1 tell you to-night that in an hour like this we 
must have religion or we are ruined. And I tell 



94 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

you, too, that religion will stay with us in an hour 
like this. Friends may attend us to the margin of 
the valley of shadows ; they may call to us and 
send us words of cheer as we go forth into its 
gloom ; but it is only religion that can go with us 
through " the valley of the shadow of death," and 
make us fearless of evil. This is the religion which, 
in the name of my living, dying Lord, I offer you 
to-night. I beseech you to accept it, and to accept 
it now. 






The Bible as a Book of History. 



"Search the Scriptures." John v. 39. 

THERE is a class of young people in every con- 
gregation, who, while they attend Church regu- 
larly, hold themselves aloof not only from member- 
ship in the Church, but from those enterprises for 
good which all moral and well-disposed persons 
should feel an interest in promoting. Passing by 
others, we mention Sabbath-schools as one of the 
enterprises thus neglected. The value of this in- 
stitution of the Church, and its influence for good 
in a community, none will question; and yet we 
often see the most regular attendants on preaching, 
and the most respectful listeners to the ministra- 
tions of the pulpit, taking no part whatever in this 
delightful field of Christian operation. Many of 
these urge in justification of their course the fact 
that they are not members of the Church, as if fail- 
ure to do their duty in one thing lessens their ob- 
ligation to do it in other things, or as if not being 
in the Church exempts them from labors connected 
with the morals and improvement of our common 
humanity. 

Eow, we take it for granted that all the young 
people of this Church — that is, all who have assumed 



96 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

the vows of the Church, and who are earnestly 
striving to keep them — have some sort of connec- 
tion with our Sabbath-school. We will not reflect 
either on your Christian integrity or the honesty 
with which you have taken on yourselves the 
Christian profession, by supposing it possible that 
any young man, or woman, holding membership 
in this Church is not engaged in this work, either 
as a teacher in its board of instruction or as a pupil 
in some of its classes. If, in this, I have presumed 
your devotion to the Church to be greater than it 
actually is, I am sorry that it is so. And let me 
say to you, kindly and plainly, that in neglecting 
this field you are failing to do your duty — you are 
neglecting a duty which is plain, positive, and es- 
sential to your growth in piety; and it is utterly in- 
excusable in you in this day of Christian activity to 
be found standing aloof from this institution of the 
Church. It is a position which none of our young 
people can occupy from choice and preserve their 
Christian profession and character intact. It is a 
position which, if you continue to maintain it, will 
sooner or later result in a complete indifference to 
any interest connected with the kingdom of Christ. 
The springs that feed your Christian life will dry 
up under this neglect ; and that life, instead of de- 
veloping into a sturdy Christian manhood, will die 
out, leaving you, like thousands now in the Church, 
with nothing but a cold, dead Christian profession on 
which to subsist. Be advised, then, by one whose 
only business as your pastor is to find out what is best 
for you to do, and to urge you to do it. Be advised by 



The Bible as a Book of History. 97 

him, and if you have not met the measure of your 
obligation in this respect heretofore, begin from 
this hour a reformation. Identify yourselves ear- 
nestly, heartily, punctually, and perseveringly with 
the Sabbath-school. Keport yourselves ready for 
duty next Sabbath — ready for duty at any post the 
superintendent may assign you. 

If there are no classes ready for you, go out in 
the city and enlist a class, for there are hundreds of 
children roaming our streets who ought to be in 
the Sabbath-school. Or, if you think yourself un- 
fit to instruct others, report yourself to some one 
of the Bible classes as a pupil, and from this hour 
begin to be an earnest, diligent searcher of that 
Word which made young Timothy "wise unto 
salvation." I do not hesitate to say that such is 
the duty of every young person in the Church, 
and I believe that every one who is under the in- 
fluence of sound religious principle will try to meet 
this duty. 

There is another class of young people, who con- 
tribute to make up our congregations, for whom we 
feel a deep solicitude, and to whom especially we 
would appeal on this subject. These are not mem- 
bers of the Church, but have a reverence for the 
Church. They as uniformly take their places in the 
house of God as those do who are recognized as 
the disciples of Christ. Their behavior there is 
always decorous and respectful. They go through 
the services of the sanctuary in a manner which in- 
dicates a high regard for religion, and which gives 
hope that they are not far from the kingdom. They 
7 



98 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

constitute a class whom we would rejoice to see en- 
rolled as students of the Word of God — as regular 
members in the Bible classes of our Sunday-schools; 
and it is with an earnest desire that you may be 
persuaded to consecrate your Sabbath mornings to 
a study of the sacred Scriptures that we shall ad- 
dress you at this hour. 

You have been appealed to often to search the 
Scriptures, on the ground of their moral influence, 
and from the consideration that your eternal hap- 
piness is bound up in the observance of the truths 
they proclaim. We admit that this is the highest 
point from which you can be appealed to on this sub- 
ject, and that as moral and immortal beings it be- 
comes you to listen ; yet we know also that it is a 
ground of appeal with which the unrenewed heart 
is not in sympathy, and that because of this it 
often fails to produce the result for which it is em- 
ployed. 

Therefore, we propose to meet you in this inter- 
view on different ground — to appeal to yon on 
another basis — in the hope that if you will not be 
induced by the higher consideration to search the 
Scriptures, you may be persuaded to do so from 
considerations with which, unless you disclaim all 
intelligence, you are in sympathy. 

We propose now to forget for the time the 
inspiration of the Scriptures, to lose sight for the 
moment of their moral influence, their power to 
mold the soul after the similitude of the divine; 
we propose to do this because the unregenerate 
heart is not in sympathy with an argument which 



The Bible as a Book of History. 99 

recognizes the saving power of the Word of God, 
and because it is quite possible that you have been 
plied with this sort of enginery until the argument 
is exhausted. Therefore, my purpose in this dis- 
cussion is to leave this beaten track, and meeting 
you on the common ground of intellectual sympa- 
thy and ambition, urge the claims of the Bible, be- 
cause of its intimate relations to intellectual culture 
and the acquisition of knowledge. 

I take it for granted that you all desire an in- 
crease of knowledge — that you have in some sort a 
proper appreciation of the value of mental cultiva- 
tion; and now if I can only convince you that the 
study of the Holy Scriptures, more than the study 
of any other book, will contribute to this culture 
and increase, I shall have placed before you a mo- 
tive for searching the Scriptures, which the sinner 
must feel equally with the Christian, and which, I 
trust, will make you anxious to form yourselves 
into Bible classes, and to meet statedly for the study 
of the sacred volume. 

There is a tendency in this age, and particularly 
among the young, to undervalue the Bible in its 
relations to the human intellect and to lose sight of 
its importance in this respect in their professed 
reverence for it as a book designed especially for 
moral influences and results. We admit that it is 
eminently the Word of salvation, and that in this 
is to be seen its greatest value. The Bible itself 
makes this solemn declaration; the evangelical 
pulpits of Christendom repeat it, and the moral 
history of the race confirms it; yet it will not do 



100 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

to sink the intellectual worth of the Bible in an 
admiration, either professed or real, of its moral 
power. It is the duty of the Church to preserve 
and perpetuate this distinction. In our efforts to 
give vigor to the mind, and to furnish food for its 
hungry faculties, we must guard against the depre- 
ciation of a book whose claims in this particular 
are of grave importance. In our esteem for it as 
an educator of the soul, we must not forget that it 
has equal power as an educator of the mind ; and 
that while it is to the former a sun, warming into 
life the moral faculties, it is to the latter no less a 
sun, pouring from its divine orbit an illumination 
richer and broader than ever fell from the circle of 
science or history or literature. 

We live in an age which it is the custom to 
magnify on account of the achievements which hu- 
man intelligence has wrought. It has done much, 
and promises to do more, and we rejoice at it all. I 
most heartily send up my individual thanksgiving 
at the progress which science and art and commerce 
have made — at the forward movements of man since 
the beginning of history: to be able to create and 
use language; to make record of the past; to enact 
laws; to build institutions; to climb the heavens, to 
search out their times and orbits, to penetrate their 
secret affinities; to count the atoms of matter; to 
bridge the sea by his inventions; to command the 
lightning itself to think his thoughts and run upon 
his errands throughout the world — to do these and 
the ten thousand other wonderful things which man 
has done is in proof that although fallen and sinful 



The Bible as a Book of History. 101 

he is nevertheless a stupendous being, and that his 
intelligence is pushing the world onward as the ages 
advance; still, we confess to an apprehension that 
in this age the advance-guard in progress are over- 
looking somewhat the great agency by which all 
forward movements are to be made permanent, and 
that because of this oversight much of what seems 
to be progress will prove to be ephemeral, and end 
in open, undisguised infidelity. 

If those who at heart are sincerely wedded to the 
interests of humanity, and who are seeking to ele- 
vate the masses, lose sight of the fundamental truth 
that the Word of God is to be looked to as the 
primal agency in all — if, we say, this truth should 
be forgotten, as we fear it is by many of our states- 
men and men of letters — the result will be that theo- 
ries in philosophy will be adopted, and schools in 
literature become ascendant, fatal alike to the truth 
as it is in Jesus and to the advance and perpetuity 
of individual and national virtue. 

What we have said has more or less connection 
with the moral view of this question, we know, and 
might under other circumstances be enlarged on 
with profit; yet, if we turn to the intellectual side, 
which is the one we have proposed to speak of, we 
shall find a most lamentable degeneracy. What, 
now, are the facts which this view of the question 
presents? Evidently, that the Bible, as a book re- 
lated to the culture of the mind and the acquisition 
of knowledge, if not entirely overlooked, has been 
assigned a subordinate place — evidently, that the 
Bible, with its historians and philosophers and poets, 



102 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

is well-nigh forgotten by our students and lit- 
erati in their devotion to Plato and Cousin, to 
Goethe and Byron, to Dickens and Thackeray, and 
the legion of dimmer lights in philosophy and lit- 
erature. In our popular institutes and colleges the 
young are taught to turn to the Mount of Parnassus, 
the vale of Tempe, the waters of Helicon, and to the 
garden of the Hesperides, for the fair and beautiful, 
as though the Bible were but a musty tome, fit to 
be looked into only by the hooded friar or the 
cowled monk. Therefore, it becomes us to inquire 
gravely into the matter, to approach this subject 
reverently, and to inquire thoughtfully into the val- 
ue of this abused and slighted volume as an instru- 
ment for intellectual culture and expansion ; and 
this we propose to do, in this and two additional 
discourses. 

We take this high position in the outset, namely, 
that for the acquisition of knowledge and for giving 
vigor and strength to the intellect, the Bible, con- 
sidered merely as a book, is of more worth to the 
student than all other books combined; and that 
therefore it is of the first importance to those who 
are aiming at intellectual excellence, and who are 
seeking knowledge, to search the Scriptures dili- 
gently. It is proper to observe that we use the 
term knowledge here in the sense of learning, 
which is, correctly speaking, the result or product 
of the faculty of knowing. 

Lord Bacon — whom but few men have equaled in 
learning — in his classification of knowledge, in the 
sense we are considering it, divides it into history, 



The Bible as a Book of History. 103 

philosophy, and poetry ; the first referring to the 
memory, the second to reason, and the third to the 
imagination. These — history, philosophy, and poetry 
— constitute, according to his arrangement, the entire 
circle of human knowledge, or learning. To have 
studied these three departments is to have acquired 
knowledge, and to have comprehended what these 
embrace is to have compassed the realm of human 
knowledge. Now, then, the volume that will give 
the most reliable and the clearest instruction, that 
will pour upon the mind the fullest illumination, 
and give to the student the most satisfactory infor- 
mation on these three grand divisions of knowledge, 
is the volume of all others most important for him 
to study, and deserves the first place in his regards. 
We hold that the Bible, above all other books, does 
this. And now, following the Baconian classifica- 
tion of knowledge, we shall devote the remainder of 
this discourse to an inquiry into the value of the 
Bible as a work of history. If you take into consid- 
eration the age in which it had its origin, including 
the scanty materials with which its earlier books 
had to build a history, and the circumstances under 
which the records were made, its equal in historic 
value cannot be found in the entire catalogue of his- 
tories. Although not written with the design of its 
being regarded in any specific sense as a history, it 
has become, in fact, the great head-spring of all his- 
tory. No matter how the waters of antiquity were 
seen to diverge in after centuries, their streams 
may all be traced to one common source, the Bible. 
It is our only guide back to that period when "the 



104 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

earth was without form and void ;" when upon the dim 
night of chaos no brightening morn had dawned — 
that long, drear, original night, in whose dark, wide 
bosom worlds and time and life itself, vegetable, ani- 
mal, rational, all slept. As we stand there amid that 
vast, silent, formless brooding, with no sun nor star 
nor sparkling nebulae visible above, no earth with 
water and tire and atmosphere around us, with no 
knowledge of being, either of God or angel or 
man or animal, not so much as thought or emo- 
tion or instinct known — as we stand there, in imag- 
ination, walled in and overhung with the wondrous, 
weird, and awful silence of that black night — this is 
the only history that speaks to us of the creation 
that followed. It tells us of the breaking light, of 
the coming of power and life there in that wide 
abyss where chaos and death held reign; of the 
spreading out of a grand pavilion of firmament 
and sky; of the kindling of magnificent lights, the 
roll of seas, the thunder of oceans, the song of 
birds, the hum of insects, the murmur of infant 
streams; of the mystery and movements of life as 
seen in the marching planet, the waving forest, the 
roving herds, the myriad creatures in air and sea, 
and above all in the miniature God — the living 
humanity placed as sovereign of a created world, 
and as head of the unborn ages. 

"In the beginning God created the heaven and 
the earth. And the earth was without form, and 
void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
the waters. And God said, Let there be light; 



The Bible as a Book of History. 105 

and there was light. And God saw the light, 
that it was good; and God divided the light from 
the darkness. And God called the light day, and 
the darkness he called night. And the evening 
and the morning were the first day." And so in 
language thus simple and beautiful does this his- 
tory detail the wonders of creation, down to the 
first Sabbath passed by Adam and Eve in their 
Eden-home. Who has not drawn pictures in his 
mind of that glorious Sabbath sun as it broke 
upon paradise, and which after lighting np the 
home of the first married pair passed silently away, 
leaving them to gaze enraptured on the starry robe 
of night above and around them? Ah, how beauti- 
ful that first holy, peaceful Sabbath, of which this 
history speaks ! Shall I tell you how it stands 
sculptured in my imagination as a thing of beauty 
and a joy forever? The six days' work was done — 
44 the heavens and the earth were finished, and all 
the host of them'' — and the day of rest, the first 
Sabbath of the world, is at hand. First came the 
dawn, breathing the odor of the fresh and dewy 
flowers, and then the streaming splendor of the sun ; 
and as the bridal pair lift their eyes, the earth and 
sky glitter and glow under their rejoicing vision. 
They behold flashing lines of light kindling into 
golden beauty on water and tree and plant and 
flower. A great joy swells their hearts as they wit- 
ness with the advancing morn the happy life of 
all God's creatures around them. They see the 
sportive play of insects, the expanding and closing 
of the butterfly's wing. They hear the grasshopper 



106 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

trilling his matin hymn from perfumed tufts, and 
the bee with its low, musical hum as he comes forth 
all warm with the sun and afloat on the breeze 
from blossoms gemmed with the dew of morning. 
They hear the song of birds as it swells from leafy 
bowers or rises from shaded nooks or scented heath 
or mountain tarn, until the day deepening high and 
bright over all, they behold the sun shining grandly 
in the sky, showering his splendor on vale and wood 
and water, and lighting up the broad, sweeping 
heavens from horizon to horizon. And now the 
noon passes, and the day declines. The sky is 
blushing at the coming night, and soon the sun has 
vanished through the flaming portal of the west. 
The failing dew bends the young flowers into peace- 
ful dreams, and stars light up their tremulous fires 
in the evening sky. In the weird beauty of that 
holy twilight stand the first pair, gazing enchanted 
upon the scene. Arcturus and Orion and all their 
shining sisterhood are before them. Planets with 
their moons and rings and belts, the mystic nebu- 
lae with its uncounted systems and far-apart suns 
and wide circles of radiant spheres, all float out like 
veiled envoys of beauty; and beneath the glitter- 
ing arch, and with their souls filled with God and 
peace and holy love, they pass silently into the land 
of sweet, beautiful dreams. 

Where now, if not in the Bible, can we find any 
satisfactory account of the beginning of this great 
system of materialities by which we are surrounded 
and of which we are a part? or of the origin of our 
race? These are questions which all accredited 



The Bible as a Book of History. 107 

history has settled according to the in formation 
gathered from this book. And so too of other 
questions growing out of these, and which became 
intelligible only under the light, emanating from 
this volume. Without this light, what would we 
know of the origin of mankind — their dispersion 
over the earth, the first peopling of the several di- 
visions of the globe, the beginning and progress of 
language, together with the birth and history of 
nations? The Bible is the only book that gives us 
a correct knowledge of the primitive forms of soci- 
ety, the systems of government first adopted, the 
modes of social intercourse, the beginnings of com- 
merce, of the arts and sciences, and of their distinct- 
ive bearings on the progress and fortunes of our 
race. It comprises also those great truths by 
which political changes have been wrought in dif- 
ferent ages, and by simply stating these, and indi- 
cating their connection with individuals and periods, 
it places in our hands a chart by which all subse- 
quent history may be explained. Although its 
annals began in the very dawn of time and 
in the infancy of our race, it comprehends 
every question of importance to that race; and by 
presenting these as they were identified with men 
and as they were evolved and illustrated by after 
ages, it has made its history to be what one has 
said of all history — "philosophy teaching by ex- 
ample." 

But the Bible does even more. It is not only a 
record of events'that have occurred, but a prophecy 
of what is to come; so that much of it may be said 



108 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

to be the "anticipation of history." This of itself 
places it high above all other histor}^ as a source of 
knowledge. All that the most brilliant historians 
of antiquity or of modern times can do is to lead 
the student along the dead past, to call up ghostly 
heroes and moldering principles and effete theo- 
ries of forgotten ages, and by their reproduction 
make him feel as though he were amonof them and 
of them. The Bible does this with a power 
equaled by no other history; and in addition, and 
by means of prophecy it bears him on through 
centuries to come ; so that of this venerable volume 
it may be said that it is not merely the history of 
the past six thousand years, but of all time and of 
all things. It becomes the history of man and the 
history of the universe — the history of time and the 
history of eternity; for these are the broad and in- 
terminable fields over which the wing of prophecy 
sweeps, and from which she gathers utterances for 
the ear of the world. Beginning with the creation 
of the material universe, it records the revolutions 
of its suns and systems, until the ponderous orbs of 
which it is composed vanish beyond mortal vision, 
and there breaks upon the eye of faith the new 
heavens and the new earth spoken of by prophecy, 
and which are to roll on forever, enameled with 
beauty and hung with glory. 

Where now, in all the annals of the past, or 
among the collections of historic lore, will you find 
a volume comparable with the Bible as a compen- 
dium of history? It contains the history of God 
and angels and men, of heaven and earth and hell, 



The Bible as a Book of History. 109 

of the past, present, and future, and is therefore the 
most wonderful, even as it is the most perfect, 
history in the world. 

To become thoroughly acquainted with this book, 
then, is to have the key to all history; and hence 
we conclude that there is no book so well calculated 
to add to our knowledge in this particular depart- 
ment as the sacred Scriptures. Therefore, the Bible 
is preeminently a book for the mind as well as the 
heart, for the intellect as well as the affections. In 
fact, as one has said of this volume: "There is no 
point of view under which it can be surveyed that 
does not commend it to the thoughtful mind as a 
wonderful book. Traveling down to us across the 
waste of far-off centuries, it brings the history of 
times" which without this volume would have been 
left to conjecture and fable. "Instructing us as to 
the creation of the magnificent universe, and defin- 
ing the authorship of that rich furniture, as well 
material as intellectual, with which this universe is 
stored," it delivers our minds, as no other book 
does, from those vague and unsatisfying theories 
which reason, unaided in her searchings, proposed 
in respect to the origin of all things. The sublimity 
too of the topics of which it treats, the dignified 
yet simple manner with which it handles them, the 
mighty mysteries which it develops, the clear illu- 
mination it throws on points of profound interest 
to beings conscious of immortality — these and other 
considerations prove that no student can rise from 
the perusal of this volume, as a book of history, 
without having his mind expanded a hundred-fold 



110 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

more than is possible from an} 7 or all of the histories 
of the world. As such, and in prayer to God that 
he would incline your minds to its diligent study, 
we commend it to the young, as the first and great- 
est history of ancient or modern times. 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 



" Thy words giveth understanding to the simple." Psalm 
cxix. 130. 

THE object of the discourse this morning was 
to set forth the value of the Bible as a book of 
history — history being the first department, accord- 
ing to Lord Bacon's classification, in the circle of 
learning. The second division in that classification 
is philosophy; and our purpose now is to show 
that the Bible, more than any other book, furnishes 
satisfactory information on those subjects which lie 
legitimately within the range of philosophic investi- 
gation. 

Now, what are those subjects? There is, first, a 
divine philosophy, which treats of God; secondly, 
a natural philosophy, which treats of material nat- 
ure ; and thirdly, a mental philosophy, which treats 
of man as a moral and intellectual being. 

It is legitimately the business of philosophy, then, 
to learn of God, the universe, and man. These, in 
fact, are the three great mysteries over which the 
ages have toiled, and where reason has been baffled ; 
and our position is that the Bible furnishes the 
clearest, and indeed the only reliable, information 
on these mysterious subjects that has ever been 



112 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

given, and that therefore it is the best book on phi- 
losophy in the world. 

We do not say that such men as Bacon and 
Locke and others have given the world nothing re- 
liable in philosophy, but we do say that where men 
have sought to know God and the universe and 
man in contempt of the Bible, as in France, or in 
ignorance of revelation, as in the older systems of 
philosophy, they have been unable to arrive at any 
thing satisfactory. 

Now then, that this question may come before 
you fairly, we propose to institute a brief compar- 
ison between the philosophy of Moses and that 
of celebrated schoolmen whose system originated 
either in independence or in ignorance of the Bi- 
ble. And that we may deal fairly with the other 
side, we shall select for this comparison from the 
systems of antiquity that of Plato — a man whose 
equal in many things has never been found among 
uninspired men. In the system of Plato there are two 
principles by the combination and exertion of which 
all existences, material and immaterial, were pro- 
duced. The first of these was held to be visible to 
the senses, and full of energy ; the second was re- 
garded as invisible and passive. The one was called 
mind, or soul, or spirit; the other was called sub- 
stance, or matter. The designs of the first were 
supposed to receive opposition from the second ; 
and storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and all 
disturbing phenomena seen in the physical world, 
were appealed to in proof of this opposition. The 
universe was supposed to be endowed with life, and 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 113 

impelled in its revolutions by an inferior, restless 
soul, which had become evil by its association with 
material things. The spiritual part of man, it was 
held, was originally pure, but had become corrupt 
by its connection with matter. 

The souls of men and the stars of heaven were 
believed to be equal in number, God having in this 
way provided for each soul a distinct and separate 
orb as its final home. Rebellious spirits, it was 
contended, were doomed to occupy a place in ma- 
terial bodies where they were to expiate their 
crimes, and from which, when the expiation was 
completed, they were to be delivered by death. 
This system made virtue to consist in the soul's 
constant opposition to the material. The soul 
was to keep in continual remembrance the exalted 
condition from which it had fallen — to separate it- 
self as far as possible from objects of sense, to re- 
strain the passions and devote itself to celestial con- 
templation. 

Plato held to the probable immortality of the 
soul, and that since it was in a material body, as 
a punishment for its rebellion whenever the creat- 
ing intelligence should obtain sufficient power 
over matter, which was its equipollent antag- 
onism, he would dissolve the relation between it 
and the soul and transmit the latter to its star-home 
above. 

We have thus briefly, and as we think fairly, out- 
lined the system of a man who, for imagination, 
for philosophic conception, for profound insight — in 
short, for great genius and power — has never had an 
8 



114 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

uninspired equal. We regard his system as ap- 
proaching nearer to truth than any other, and as 
having reached the highest point in philosophy 
accessible to unassisted reason. In a celebrated 
painting by Raphael, called the " School of Athens,'* 
Plato is represented as standing with serene coun- 
tenance, dignified mien, and hand lifted to heaven 
as if in the act of revealing the mysteries of nature 
to a listening world. It was a noble conception, 
worthy of the artist and the subject. 

And yet, when this system is compared with that 
of Moses, the grand teachings of the Greek philos- 
opher sink into insignificance before the grander 
yet simpler revelations of the Midian shepherd. To 
say nothing now of the fact that Plato was indebted 
to Moses (whose system was older, and was widely 
circulated at the time that Plato wrote) for many of 
his principles — to say nothing of this unquestionable 
fact — a slight examination will satisfy us that the 
Platonian philosophy abounds with contradictions 
and absurdities. The fundamental principle in it 
ascribes all existence to two antagonistic and eternal 
principles, and this supposes that there are two dis- 
tinct, independent, and eternal natures, which is not 
only an absurdity, but an absolute impossibility. 
These two distinct, independent, and eternal nat- 
ures, it is contended, were so combined in different 
proportions, and according to certain models which 
existed eternally in the conceptions of the Divine 
mind, as to have produced the infinite variety of 
forms seen around us. In all this you cannot fail 
to see how contradictions increase and impossibili- 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 115 

ties multiply at every step, so that the student who 
seeks to arrive at any thing satisfactory on questions 
of philosophic research will, if he take Plato for 
his guide, become first perplexed, then maddened, 
and at last despairing. 

Now, the Mosaic philosophy makes all created ex- 
istence the result of one cause. It reveals that 
cause as a Being of infinite perfections; as an abso- 
lute Sovereign, against whom no antagonisms can 
prevail, and who is beyond the control of what has 
been called philosophic necessity, as the unoriginated 
God and Father of all, who is above all things and 
has control of all. In this you see no absurdity, no 
contradiction — nothing but causation and conse- 
quence, and the whole accordant with reason. You 
see no dual supremacy, no equipollent and op- 
posing forces, no war of spirit and matter, as in 
the Platonian philosophy; but simple, unchallenged 
sovereignty and unbroken harmony. This is the 
God of our philosophy. The object of our love 
and worship and trust is no philosophic abstrac- 
tion, no vague, intangible principle, fighting his 
way through coeternal antagonisms; no panthe- 
istic divinity, brooding solemnly amid old woods, 
and beside moaning seas, and beneath shining 
stars, content with inspiring material forms, from 
the mountain daisy to the marching planet, with 
life and essence and spirit. No ! our God is a 
person, a reality, a being — vaster than space, more 
awful than nature, more majestic than the uni- 
verse; as infinite as he is benevolent, and as glori- 
ous as he is infinite. 



116 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

We tarn next to the second great mystery, which 
is the universe, and proceed to inquire what light 
the Bible sheds at this point. 

For ages beyond the first records of profane his- 
tory the universe existed. When these records 
began, the far-off heavens were lighted up as now, 
and our globe, with its earth and water and lire and 
air, was to all appearances as it now is. Its mount- 
ains were standing, its seas were ebbing and flow- 
ing, its rivers were running, its seasons were com- 
ing and going, its zones were frigid and temperate 
and torrid, its elements were calm and stormy, as 
now. To all appearances the universe has known 
no infancy, no childhood, but stood forth in the 
beginning in all the perfection and strength of a 
thing completed at once. It is a great mystery. 
The mind is awed as it confronts the universe of 
matter, with its combinations, its suns and spheres 
and complicated systems, separated so widely as 
that light itself expires in the intervening abysses. 
We wonder when it began, how it was built, what 
the properties of which it is composed ; and to 
answer these inquiries has been the effort of phi- 
losophy in all ages. 

Now, we do not claim for the Bible that it in- 
structs us in the affinities and properties of matter; 
that it gives us, for instance, the measurements and 
calculations of astronomy, or the minute analyses 
which belong to chemistry. This is the work of 
science rather than philosophy. It is with the ori- 
gin rather than the dimensions of the universe that 
philosophy is concerned ; and we may safely affirm 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 117 

that the best solution that has ever been given is 
found in the opening sentence of the Mosaic record: 
"In the beginning God created the heaven and 
the earth." This sentence has more sound philoso- 
phy in it than can be found in all the libraries in 
the world. Men may talk of solution, but the only 
solution to be found is in that simple;declaration. 
Its philosophy is clear and comprehensible. The 
ignorant cottager understands it, and can foil the 
skeptic with it. The poor Indian, standing in his 
forest-temple, in sound of the thunder-peal, which 
to him is the voice of the Creator, can see the fitness 
and the connection between cause and effect here. 
It breaks the mystery, and the universe stands be- 
fore us not as a thing of chance, not as an organic 
growth, but as created, and with God as its maker 
and upholder. 

The third topic in which philosophy is interested 
is man, the greatest, and in some respects the most 
incomprehensible, of all mysteries. 

The origin, nature, and destiny of man have been 
questions of speculation in all past time. When he 
contemplates himself as he is — a being of wonderful 
faculties, forever seeking, yet never satisfied, and 
destined at last to die and become dust — it is but 
natural that he should ask: "From whence came 
I? what am I? and whither am I going?" These 
questions have come from every thoughtful soul; 
and they have been variously answered. These an- 
swers are found in the fables of antiquity and in the 
speculations of modern infidelity ; and yet they have 
failed to give satisfaction. The only response that 



118 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

can relieve the soul of its disquiet comes from the 
Word of God. According: to the philosophy of that 
book, man came from God — is the offspring of the 
Divine mind, and is a compound of matter and 
spirit. It teaches that God formed his body out 
of clay, that into this curiously wrought piece of 
mechanism he breathed the breath of life, and that 
man became a living soul. Coming from God, he 
is like God in nature, is a spiritual being, is en- 
dowed with intellect and heart, and was made to 
know and love God. This philosophy places him 
at the head of creation and stamps him with a 
value greater than the universe. 

Against this view, infidelity has pointed to the 
heavens and asked, What is man, compared with all 
that magnificence and splendor? We tell the in- 
fidel, in reply: Your universe, with all its pomp and 
complication, is without reason — it has no intelli- 
gence, there is no throb of consciousness in all its 
mighty heart; and because of this destitution, it is 
infinitely less than man in dignity and worth. 
What is all its glory in the absence of intelligence, 
consciousness, and love ? The sun is ignorant of its 
own splendor, the thunder cannot hear its own 
voice, the lightning knows nothing of its own 
brightness, the air is not susceptible to its own re- 
freshing qualities; while the grand old earth has 
beauty for the eye and music for the ear, and 
power to elevate and fill the spirit of man, and 
while these all contribute to lead his thoughts up 
to God and to bind his affections to the Father 
of all, they are themselves without intelligence, 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 119 

without feeling, without love; and this intelli- 
gence and feeling and love man has, and is there- 
fore grander in nature and greater in value than 
them all. 

Irreverent science may unveil the universe ; infi- 
delity may parade her planets with their spacious 
sweeps ; she may make every star a sun, and every 
sun the center of a system of secondary luminaries, 
all multiplying, until the science of numbers fails 
to enumerate the millions of starry pulses throbbing 
in the sky ; yet man is greater than them all, for it 
is he that measures their orbits, that tracks them in 
their flight, that makes them subservient to devo- 
tion and hope and confidence by proving them to 
be manifestations of the wisdom and power and love 
of the Godhead. Who does not rejoice at this 
knowledge, this revelation of his spirituality, found 
in the philosophy of the Bible ? It furnishes incen- 
tives to higher and holier living; for a nature thus 
grand in its ruins may rise to the divine. It pre- 
sents motives to us to labor for the meanest and most 
abandoned of our race; for it shows that even in the 
most degraded soul there are germs of good, which 
if cared for and nurtured will grow and blossom 
and bear fruit. 

Planted on this philosophy, you can go to the 
drunkard, the felon, the miserable outcast from 
society, the poor abandoned wretch whose life is a 
ruin and a wreck — you can go to him, toppling as 
he is on the very verge of hell, and by telling him 
of his origin, his noble lineage, his inherited im- 
mortality, persuade him to break the chains of his 



120 Phil. P. Neehfs Sermons. 

accursed bondage and stand forth a free man, a 
comfort to the dear ones at home, and a monument 
of the redeeming grace of God. 

We turn now from man's nature to his destiny, 
which is another n^stery with which philosophy 
has wrestled. On this subject the ancients were 
divided into three classes. The first, or Aristo- 
telian class, held to the doctrine of annihilation. 
Their motto was, "Where death is, we are 
not." "Death," said their leader, "is the most 
terrible of all things: it is the end of our exist- 
ence ; and after it man has neither to expect 
good nor to fear evil." The second class held 
the theory of emanation and reabsorption, be- 
lieving the spiritual in man to be a part of God, 
and that at death it would revert back to him. 
The third class went still farther. They had 
hope of a life and home after death, where the 
good were to be happy; yet their opinions were 
crude and unsatisfactory, and were held, as 
Cicero declared, "only while contemplating the 
proofs by which they were maintained." The 
first were avowed infidels, the second denied the 
individuality of the soul, while the third, or Pla- 
tonian class, held but a fluctuating hope of immor- 
tality. 

The result of all these inquiries proves that mere 
reason cannot grapple with this question of human 
destiny. We would not undervalue reason. We 
admit that she has won marvelous triumphs; yet 
we contend that her highest summit was climbed 
when, without illumination from the Bible, she an- 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 121 

nounced that immortality was possible; but this 
announcement had nothing in it that was satisfying. 
It was only as a gleam of light from some far-away 
realm — as faint whisperings from some unknown 
state to come, giving hope of a brighter world and 
a better companionship, yet giving no certainty. 
Nevertheless the discovery of this bare possibility 
of a future life, which unassisted reason made, was 
itself an evidence of the grandeur of the soul; and 
I feel awed as I contemplate the process by which 
this might} 7 achievement was won. I see her first 
settling the question of her immateriality. If dis- 
tinct from matter, she natural!} 7 concludes that she 
is superior to it, how wonderful soever may be 
its combinations. Impressed thus with her great- 
ness and dignity and grandeur, she then adventures 
upon the amazing sweep of reasoning by analogy 
and comparison. She fixes her eye upon the illu- 
minated heavens and begins the work of enumera- 
tion and contrast. She computes the number of 
worlds; she takes in the span and altitude of each; 
she gazes bewildered on their number and magni- 
tude. When at the point of despair, she gathers 
new life and hope at the remembrance that God 
has endowed her with intelligence, and that she is 
therefore greater in nature than all that sparkling 
magnificence above. She concludes that if greater 
in nature she must be grander in destiny — may live 
when every star and every fire shall have gone out; 
upborne by this consciousness and hope, she pours 
forth her shout of immortality ; and yet that shout 
is but the shout of hope. She has only reached the 



122 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

border-line of eternity. There she stands now — a 
thing of glory — gazing back on the path of her 
travel and thrilled with the hope of immortality. 
There she stands with poised and weary wing, 
breathless and expectant, yet uncertain. There she 
is, on the summit of that infinite height; and as I 
see her hovering near the gate-way, her eye flashing 
with hungering desire to enter — longing and hoping 
for some hand to throw wide the portal that she may 
pass in — I feel how sublime a thing the soul must be ; 
but alas! as she hovers there, so full of hope, there 
passes by a funeral throng, bearing a dead body to 
the grave; and as she gazes upon that pageantry of 
death, and hears the living call, yet receives no an- 
swer from the cold, dumb lips of the silent sleeper, 
her beautiful fabric crumbles, her eagle eye is struck 
blind, and she comes back weeping, doubting, and 
despairing. 

Human reason, my friends, can go no farther 
than this. The grave is her victor. The sepul- 
cher is dumb, and will not answer her anxious 
askings. Her lights all go out at the mouth of 
the tomb, and here, where most of all we want 
assurance, the philosophy of this world is si- 
lent. Other questions are purely speculative, but 
this question of life after death is practical. It 
concerns us personally, immediately, and eternally. 
We go with our friends to the borders of the tomb. 
While the pulse beats and the heart is warm, they 
speak to us; but soon the lips grow pale, the voice 
falters, the eye swims in death, and we call, but 
they answer not again. Yesterday *they were with 






The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 123 

us; to-day they are buried. is the past nothing 
but a dream! Has the future no hope? Are those 
eyes which once beamed on us with such fond af- 
fection closed in eternal darkness? Are those lips 
which in life were so eloquentof love silent forever? 
Is there no life to come, when our dead are to be giv- 
en back to us? Tell me! tell me! for they were bone 
of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. They were my 
household idols, dearer to me than life; and my full 
heart would know the worst! tell me, for I too 
am voyaging with torn sail and tattered canvas 
toward that dark, dismal ocean! I see the signs 
of my broken cordage, and hear the sound of my 
rent canvas flapping in the midnight winds, and 
feel that I am nearing that stormy sea; and if there 
be no pilot to guide me through, I am lost. 

I thank God that here, where human philosophy 
is silent on the question of human destiny, the Bible 
speaks . with no uncertain utterance, and that the 
revelation it gives has power to make music around 
the death-beds of the dying, and to kindle hope 
among the graves of the departed ! It tells me that 
the soul is immortal; that though the rooted hills 
may fall, the mountains become dust, and the ocean 
vapor, no decay shall ever touch the universe of 
souls; that though the very stars of heaven shall 
fade and fall, and the whole system of nature shall 
at length expire, the humblest, poorest, lowliest 
among us have been born into an undying life; 
that we stand on the great platform of immortal 
natures, with a dying universe below us and an eter- 
nal God above us, and that amid all the mournful 



124 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

scenery of death by which we are surrounded, we 
alone are deathless; that our dead have only passed 
into a nobler life, where they await us in all the 
bloom and freshness of immortality ; that there with 
God and them we may share an existence to which 
the age of the earth, of the starry heavens, and of 
the whole vast universe will be less than a morning 
dream — a glorious life, in which, after millions on 
millions of centuries have passed, we shall bound 
into the endless race with all the freshness of im- 
mortal infancy, and with an eagerness that will 
welcome enjoyments ever new. 

This philosophy teaches us that as we were 
born for eternity, eternity shall surely be ours; 
that this longing for everlasting mansions, which 
the disquieted soul feels, is but the prophecy 
of the eternal life to come, and that that life 
will be one of deathless love. This is the phi- 
losophy of the Bible, in the question of man's 
destiny, and it abounds with comfort as well 
as instruction. What neither the idealisms of 
Plato nor the speculations of modern schools 
could determine is settled beyond question in this 
volume. What the light of nature but dimly shad- 
owed is here disclosed with certainty; and while 
we bury our dead out of our sight, we feel that they 
still live, and that we shall meet them again. We 
need not, with Ion of Argns, ask that question of 
the hills that look eternal ; nor of the flowing streams 
that lucid flow forever; nor of the stars, amid whose 
fields of azure we have often trod in glory; but of 
the Bible, on whose declarations we rest our hopes, 



The Bible as a Book of Philosophy. 125 

and which tells us that the believing dead " sleep 
in Jesus." It is a beautiful expression — sleeping in 
Jesus. They have passed through their day of 
toil. The night of rest has come. With closed 
eyes and folded hands, they are lying on the bed 
where Jesus slept. 

They softly lie and sweetly sleep 
Low in the ground. 

They are gathering vigor for the coming morn. 
weep not for those who sleep in Jesus ! The pain 
of life with them has passed, its anguish is over, its 
cares have ended, its sorrows have ceased; and now 
they u sleep in Jesus. " They are not dead, but only 
sleep — sleep in Jesus. The soul still lives, and 
when the morning comes — for, thank God, it will 
come! — its beautiful light will kindle upon the 
burial-places of the world — when the morning 
comes, the sleeping bodies of God's saints are to 
come forth from their places of slumber to be 
clothed with immortality and admitted into the 
presence of the Lord. 

This, we say, is our philosophy, and we are satis- 
fied with it — satisfied to live and die upon its decla- 
rations. Will you not study the volume that teach- 
es it? Will you not seek to enlarge your minds by 
taking in the great truths it enunciates ? Will you 
not heed its voice, when it lifts the veil of mystery 
from God, from the universe, and from man? Will 
you not love it, when it comes to you in your sorrow 
and when death has made you desolate, and offers 
you comfort? when it plants the angel of hope by 
your side, which, with hand pointing to heaven, 



126 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

whither the loved have gone, tells you of a golden 
isle where parted barks may all be moored at last, 
fast-anchored by the eternal throne? 

May the entrance of this Word give you light 
and comfort and eternal salvation ! 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 



"Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song 
unto the Lord, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord, 
for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider 
hath he thrown into the sea." Exodus xv. 1. 

WE have read you this opening strain in the 
song of Moses and the children of Israel, 
delivered on the occasion of their triumphant pas- 
sage through the'Eed Sea, as highly suggestive, in 
view of the subject to be discussed, which is the 
value of the Bible, considered as a book of poetry; 
and as this discourse will close the series on the 
Bible, we beg leave in the outset to present a sum- 
mary of what has gone before. 

The position assumed, and which we have been 
defending, is that the Bible, considered simply as a 
book, and apart from its claims to inspiration, is the 
most valuable book in the world as a help to the 
acquisition of knowledge. The object we had in 
this was to lead the unconverted to place a high- 
er estimate on the Scriptures, and to induce them, 
by considerations addressed to the mind, and based 
wholly upon intellectual sympathy, to connect 
themselves with the Bible classes in our Sabbath- 
schools and to enter upon the study of the Bible. 



128 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

In attempting to maintain this position, we made 
Lord Bacon's classification of knowledge into histo- 
ry, philosophy, and poetry our stand-point, and pro- 
ceeded in the first discourse to consider the claims 
of the Bible as a work of history, and to compare it 
as such with other productions. In the second dis- 
course we considered its claims as a work of phi- 
losophy, and the clearness with which it shed its 
illumination on the subjects of God, the universe, 
and man. In order to present the subject fairly, we 
instituted a comparison between the philosophy of 
Plato and that of the Bible, and endeavored to 
show the superiority of the latter over the former. 
The system of Plato was selected because we regard 
it as the best uninspired exposition of philosophy 
that has ever been given. Whether we take those 
systems that preceded Plato, or the Grecian schools 
which came after him, or the more recent theories 
of Descartes, Spinoza, and others, we find nothing 
comparable to Plato; and Plato, we hold, is not to 
be compared with Moses as a philosopher. Even 
the school founded by Bacon and Reid and Locke 
is indebted to the Bible for whatever of truth it 
possesses; all of which goes to make good our po- 
sition that the Bible is the most valuable of all 
books as an instrumentality for the acquisition of 
knowledge. 

We come now to consider the remaining branch 
in our classification of knowledge, or learning, 
which is poetry, and to inquire into the claims of 
the Bible in this respect. 

Poetry has been very properly adjudged the first 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 129 

place in age and excellence among the fine arts. It 
was the first fixed form of language — the earliest 
perpetuation of thought. It existed before prose 
in history, before music in melody, before painting 
in description, and before sculpture in imagery. 
History, we have said, concerns the memory, and 
philosophy the reason, while it belongs to poetry to 
speak to the imagination. Its essential connection 
is with the beautiful, the true, and the good; with 
the beautiful, because whatever is lovely calls it into 
being; with the true, because its foundations rest 
upon the truth of things ; and with the good, because 
whatever is purest has most power to attract it. 

Among pagan nations the faculty of the poet was 
held to be an emanation from the gods. In this 
they were not far from the truth. The true poet is 
the called of God and the anointed of Heaven. How 
this is I may not be able to show, but I am satisfied 
that there never was a great poet who learned his 
art or could teach it. It came to him as a gift from 
Heaven, and as such he could not impart it to others. 
We speak now of the poet, not the rhymster — of 
poetry, not doggerel ; for if any one department of 
knowledge has been abused by village vanity and 
country conceit, it is this of poetry — as all schooldom, 
newspaperdom, and especially all wisdom, can bear 
witness. It is a pity that these sighing swains and 
languishing Clorindas do not read and apply the 
Ayrshire plowman's expressive couplet: 

wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us ! 

For it might " frae monie a blunder free" them. 



130 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

We repeat that in its truest, highest, and noblest 
sense, the poetic faculty may be regarded as an in- 
spiration from Heaven. Poetic genius maybe, and 
often is, improved in creative measure, and in de- 
velopment and display, by learning and refinement ; 
yet among the rudest people, and the most illiterate 
men, it has been found like native gold and un- 
wrought diamond — as pure and perfect in essence, 
though incrusted with baser matter, as among 
the most enlightened nations and in the best edu- 
cated circles. It is seen less frequently among 
the first, because it is less laboriously dug from the 
mine and less studiedly purified in the furnace, or 
polished on the wheel. When seen at all, it is be- 
cause some irrepressible outgush brings it to the 
surface. Once in awhile it is washed from the 
mountains, or seen glittering in the sand, and being 
recognized as pure gold by some polished mind of 
kindred metal, it becomes current despite the want 
of education and culture and refinement. 

What is poetry ? We answer that poetry is the 
intellect coming forth in its grandest but simplest 
forms, and wearing its most beautiful robes. It is 
the imagination scattering the light of truth from 
the kindled fire within — not by slow deductions, 
but from inspiration; and hence the true poet has 
somewhat of divineness. He is essentially creative, 
and is wedded to the beautiful. Th e spirit of beau- 
ty enthralls him, commands him, and rules him. 
He is forever smitten with it, and forever worships it, 
bowing at its shrines, and exclaiming with Shelley, 
awful loveliness ! 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 131 

To his imagination all beauty is typical — whether 
seen in the ever-varying splendor of rising and set- 
ting suns; or in the quiet beauty of night; or in the 
bursting buds and opening flowers of spring; or in 
the midnight thunder, leaping among the mountain 
barriers of the sky ; or in the dark eye of woman ; or 
in the smile of the infant, as it slumbers on its moth- 
er's knee; in all, he beholds types of a beauty far 
oft', yet attainable — symbols of a beauty infinite and 
Godlike — and therefore he worships it. 

As perfection in form and taste in dress are essen- 
tial to physical beauty, so in poetry the thought 
itself and the language in which it is expressed 
should be faultless. The combination of these in 
song makes it resemble the Venus of Praxitiles, 
which was covered with a representation of gauze so 
delicate that the ancients complimented the artist 
by calling it "woven wind." Now, in poetry, this 
rare and felicitous combination makes what has 
been exquisitely called "the drapery of a poet's 
dream." 

The true poet should always be regarded as one 
of God's own messengers. He comes rarely, but 
when he does come, he stands, like Shakespeare 
and Milton, apart from and high above millions of 
his kind ; and we feel like exclaiming with rever- 
ence, " How beautiful are his feet, as he stands upon 
the mountain of imagination and pours glad tidings 
down into the valley where men toil in weariness!" 
He comes to the children of sorrow and labor to 
tell them that the day is breaking — that the light, to 
behold which they have been straining the vision 



132 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

through the long night, is kindling upon the mount- 
ain-tops, and that soon the valley of darkness and 
sorrow will stand high and bright under the deep- 
ening day. Therefore, the true poet has a divine 
mission to his race. The command is to him, as 
to others, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people;" 
and woe to him if he prove false to that command — 
woe to him if, as too many have done, he pours out 
the gall of sarcasm and misanthropy instead of mes- 
sages of tenderness and encouragement; for to do 
this is to weave for his brow a crown of fire instead 
of a wreath of fame. 

As God's messenger to man, he has a great mis- 
sion — a mission which, alas! but few have filled 
nobly. He is to bid his race come forth from 
their bondage and go forward, so that, as Longfel- 
low sings, 

Each to-morrow 
May find them farther than to-day. 

He but degrades himself and his mission if, with great 
powers to fulfill it, he emasculates his intellectual 
manhood by squandering his time and talents in 
songs for the festive board and for convivial mirth, 
or by sonnets in honor of Venus and Cupid. Such 
ignoble dallying may do for birds of feeble wing, 
but the eagles of song will stretch a nobler pinion 
and seek a grander sweep. Like those Hebrew 
bards of which the Bible speaks, who made the 
desert resound with odes in which the children of 
Israel were told of a land flowing with milk and 
honey — odes to which the pillar of fire seemed to 
listen with complacency and to flash out a deeper 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 133 

crimson of silent praise — like those old Bible poets 
of the wilderness, the poets of this age should tell 
the toiling millions of this desert of time of a land 
of fairer promise and of better things. 

We have dwelt thus long on poetry in general, 
and upon the work to which the poet is called, be- 
cause, as a general thing, the people of this country 
do not adequately estimate either the one or the 
other. 

We are not chargeable perhaps with an under- 
valuation of certain kinds of poetry — such as bal- 
lads and lyrics, which catch the eye from the corner 
of the morning paper and impart to the fashionable 
reader, as she yawns over the memory of the last 
night's dissipation, a momentary but sweet refresh- 
ment; but how few are there who take pleasure in 
such wonderful creations as Milton has left us ! We 
do not mean in this to disparage lyrical poetry, for 
it has scattered the seeds of truth and the flowers of 
fancy in many a desert place of life. Lyrics have 
been compared to "sparks of Promethean fire float- 
ing down to light up a happy glow in the soul;" 
and the comparison is as true as it is beautiful. 
They are as spring blossoms dropping from the tree 
of knowledge to cheer the passing pilgrim as stray 
peris from the bowers of paradise, creeping playful- 
ly into the chambers of the heart; as single strains 
of rare music, waking long echoes; or as wild 
flowers blooming by the way-side to cheer and glad- 
den the worn and weary — and therefore are not to 
be despised. They have done and are still doing 
marvels in the world, as any one must know who 



134 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

will think of the influence of Goethe's and Schil- 
ler's lyrics in Germany, and of the popular ballads 
in all nations. The "Cotter's Saturday Night," has 
hallowed Scotland more than the fame of her bat- 
tles. The poetry of the affections as breathed from 
the harp of Mrs. Hemans lingers around the hearth- 
stones and graves of two nations, and the ballads of 
Moore and Burns still echo in the halls of pleasure 
and around firesides where " cronies meet." The 
missionary hymn of Heber, and the songs of Watts 
and Newton and the Wesleys, will live as long as 
religion has a shrine or God a worshiper. 

It is not that we value lyrical poetry less, but epic 
more, that we dwell here in our address to the 
young. Each is good, but one is grander and more 
inspiring than the other; and the very fact that it 
requires study in order to its comprehension, ear- 
nest thought in order to its enjoyment, shows how 
important it is for the young who are seeking 
knowledge to betake themselves to a kind of poe- 
try that will add to their intellectual vigor. The 
poetry that will most surely and effectually accom- 
plish this is to be found in the Bible. The claims 
of the Bible in this respect have long been without 
question. No argument is needed to establish 
them, for they have been universally acknowl- 
edged. Critics of the first taste and cultivation, 
scholars the most learned and profound in every 
nation — and many of them openly professing to 
have no sympathy with this volume — have frankly 
admitted that for poetical compositions of the high- 
est order, and evincing the loftiest genius, the Bible 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 135 

stands unrivaled. And in fact there are reasons 
aside from the inspiration of this volume why it 
should rank high as a poetical composition. Look, 
for instance, at the early constitution of the Jewish 
nation, and you will see that every thing connected 
with that people was calculated to foster and ma- 
ture the spirit of poetry. Contemplate them in 
their national adolescence. They were young and 
fresh and full of hope. A brilliant destiny had 
been promised them, and even on the supposition 
now that their religion was only superstition, it 
had sufficient control of the national thought to 
amount to a settled conviction. The promise was 
that through them "all the families of the earth 
should be blessed." They received the promise as 
from God. They believed it. The young grew up 
in this conviction, and the old rejoiced in it as their 
great preeminence. It gave them importance in 
their own estimation, and interest in the eyes of all 
other nations. It supplied them with those mighty 
hopes and grand ambitions in which the soul of po- 
etry dwells, and on w T hich it feeds. It fired their 
courage, and made them invincible in war. They 
believed themselves to be the chosen instruments of 
God to carry forward his great purposes along the 
ages, and that they were under his special protec- 
tion. They comprehended the dignity of their po- 
sition and the magnitude of their mission, and were 
duly impressed with the grandeur of each. In ad- 
dition, they received direct and immediate revela- 
tions from God. They were admitted to personal 
interviews with him by the fissured rock, at the 



136 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

burning bush, and at the base of the smoking mount- 
ain. They had seen him part the waves of the 
sea for their deliverance, and then roll them in 
upon their enemies. For them he had spread the 
protecting cloud by day, and kindled the pillar of 
fire to direct them at night. He had rained manna 
from heaven to feed them, and had made the desert 
rock pour out water for them to drink. They had 
stood around their altar of worship, and had seen 
fire descend from heaven at the call of their proph- 
et and consume their sacrifice. In one of their 
fiercest conflicts they had beheld the surrounding 
hills covered with a celestial army, sent to give 
them victory. These unparalleled wonders made 
them a nation of poets, and prepared them as a peo- 
ple to give to the world the sublimest strains that 
have ever been sung and these immortal produc- 
tions have been handed down to us in a volume 
which, while it is the most accessible of all volumes, 
is the most neglected by the young. We under- 
take to say that there is not a work of pagan an- 
tiquity or of modern times comparable to the poetic 
books in that volume. 

Beginning now with Homer, and coming down 
through Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, 
and Milton, there is nothing in all their magnificent 
march of rhyme to equal the song of Miriam, under 
the pealing numbers of which the old hills of Araby 
trembled, while the obedient waves rolled back 
upon the chariots and horsemen of the pursuing 
foe until they all slept beneath their watery shroud. 
So also of the one hundred and fourth Psalm, which 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 137 

as an emanation of genius, and as a specimen of 
descriptive poetry, will bear competition with any 
production of the past or present. It is a song com- 
memorative of the power and providence of God. 
It begins with an apostrophe to him as one " clothed 
with honor and majesty; one who covereth himself 
with light as a garment; who stretcheth out the 
heavens like the curtain of a tent; who layeth the 
beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh 
the clouds his chariot; who walketh upon the 
wings of the wind." From this apostrophe the 
psalmist next exhibits the power of God, as seen in 
creation and as manifested in the flood, when "the 
waters stood above the mountains," and when, hav- 
ing accomplished their ministry of wrath, "at his 
rebuke they fled; at the voice of his thunder they 
hasted away." And after having depicted this 
scene of devastation, he succeeds it by one of 
amity and fruitfulness, thus exquisitely described: 
"He sendeth the spring into the valleys which run 
among the hills. They give drink to every beast of 
the field ; the wild asses quench their thirst. By 
them shall the fowls of heaven have their habita- 
tion which sing among the branches." He goes on 
then to represent the earth as pouring from her lap 
abundance of food for man and beast. He next 
notes the habits of various animals, and reviews the 
revolutions of the heavenly bodies, bringing day and 
night and the changes of seasons. He discloses the 
depths of the great wide sea, together with the end- 
less diversities of its strange population, and deduces 
from this the goodness of God in providing for the 



138 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

happiness of living things innumerable, "both 
great and small." Passing by other portions of 
this song, we call your attention particularly to one 
passage, the picturesque reality of which cannot 
but be perceived by every man who has a heart to 
feel horror, or an eye to rejoice in beauty: "Thou 
makest darkness, and it is night; wherein all the 
beasts of the forest do creep forth. The young 
lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat 
from God. The sun ariseth, they gather them- 
selves together, and lay down in their dens. Man 
goeth forth unto his work and to his labor until the 
evening. O Lord, how manifold are thy works! 
in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is 
full of thy riches." 

The poetry of the Bible necessarily partakes of 
the times and circumstances under which it was 
written, and is therefore unlike all other poetry. 

The Jews, as we have said, were the founders of 
a chosen race of people, who were to be the inherit- 
ors of the earth. Their religious creed was some- 
what chaotic, unformed, obscure, but infinite. It 
embraced God, and reached out into an eternity 
where its glory was to be manifested. It appealed 
to the imagination and faith of the worshiper, and 
was felt most in solitude and under the protecting 
shadow of immensity. And so too of the poetry of 
that people and age. It is the poetry of imagina- 
tion and faith. In one sense it is abstract and dis- 
embodied, without form yet full of power, not de- 
spising social life yet living in solitude more, and 
contemplating man not so much in the multitude 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 139 

as alone in the world, surrounded by the original 
forms of nature — the rocks, the earth, the sky. It is 
rarely directed to active and heroic enterprise, but 
to a recognition of the infinite — the solemn brood- 
ing and overshadowing of immensity — to faith in a 
presiding providence, and resignation to the govern- 
ing power of the universe. It is pervaded by the 
thought that God is near to the creature, and that 
he takes an immediate share in all the affairs of hu- 
man life. It seems to suppose each man to be a 
type of the race — an aggregation of the multitude, 
and a representative of God. In the story of Ruth, 
for instance, it is as if all the depth of natural affec- 
tion in the human race was involved in her breast. 
All these things gave intensity to the poetry of that 
age, and clothed it with a shadowy grandeur, a 
weird, wondrous, and overpowering sublimity, not 
found in the poetry of any other age or people. In 
the book of Job there is an intensity of passion, and 
a magnificence and prodigality of imagery beyond 
any thing even in Homer. And so with all the 
poetical books of the Old Testament. They abound 
in metaphors unequaled for boldness and beauty 
and sublimity, and evince a power and intensity 
of passion and imagination before which the mind 
sinks in awe and wonder. And then the imagery 
employed is always natural — taken from nature, 
and in harmony with it. The mystic brooding of 
which we have spoken, while it is vague and unsat- 
isfying, just as nature is, is never jarring. The feel- 
ing produced is not the infinite, but a longing for 
it, such as one often feels in the depths of old woods, 



140 Phil. P. JNeely's Sermons. 

or on the shore of a moaning sea, or beneath the 
solemn and beautiful light of stars. The soul 
groans under the pressure of such a feeling. It 
stretches away from time into infinity, and throbs 
with a prophecy of the coming glory. This feeling, 
or something kindred to it, we experience when in 
communication with the Old Testament bards, and 
it is this that will give them an everlasting influ- 
ence over humanity. 

Now then, if what we have said of the Bible in 
these discourses be true, with what emphasis does 
it appeal to the young to make themselves thor- 
oughly conversant with its contents! In all that 
has been said, the moral influence of this volume 
has been lost sight of. We have spoken of it sim- 
ply as a book — a great book — great in history, in 
philosophy, and in poetry. In these respects we 
commend it to the young. We commend it to you 
on the ground of intellectual sympathy, and in the 
hope that you all desire knowledge, and are willing 
to pay the price in study and toil at which knowl- 
edge may be had. We commend it especially to 
those of you whom the fortunes of war have left 
with the burden of labor, of daily drudgery for a 
support, upon you, but who are fired with an ambi- 
tion to win an honorable place in the ranks of thought 
and culture. With the Bible as your text-book, you 
may win that place in spite of poverty. 

Bead the history of the early preachers of Meth- 
odism, and be encouraged. Many of them, without 
scholastic training, with no helps from professors of 
theology, with nothing but the Bible and God and 



The Bible as a Book of Poetry. 141 

nature, worked their way up from poverty and ig- 
norance to the measure of giants in intellect and 
influence. They went forth with this book, from 
the plow and work-bench and desk, on their cir- 
cuits, and while pondering its mighty truths amid 
the grandeur of hills and mountains and forests, the 
sleeping forces within were stirred; and so going on 
from the mastery of one great truth to the conquest 
of another, these bearing them on into the regions 
un invaded by human science and philosophy, they 
stood at last priests in the temple of knowledge, 
and princes in the kingdom of mind. If you too 
would triumph over poverty and labor in this com- 
petition for knowledge, begin at once the systematic 
study of this book. There is no branch of learning 
that it does not furnish. If you want history, it 
is here. If you would be learned in philosophy, 
her utterances come clear and distinct from these 
pages. If you would lap your soul in the music 
of song, here are numbers before whose high har- 
mony the archangels in heaven might well stand 
uncovered of their crowns. Make it your first 
book then. Imbue your minds with its great 
thoughts. Lay hold upon its sublime truths, and 
be lifted by them up into all noble living, and 
then you will find that they have power not 
only to crown you in the world of mind, but to 
enthrone you also amid the pomp and splendor of 
heaven. 



Providence. 



" What profit should we have, if we pray unto him? " Job 
xxi. 15. 

TOU have sometimes heard men ask, I dare 
say. "What is the use of praying?" It is a 
question as old as the time of Job, as we may learn 
from the text, and was founded then, as now, in a 
belief in the doctrine of necessity and a disbelief in 
that of providence. 

Those who believe what this question implies, 
whether in the Church or out, are materialists; and 
it would astonish some of you to know how many 
professing Christians in all denominations are drift- 
ing toward this form of materialism. They have 
become practical believers in necessity. The Al- 
mighty, they argue, has put his whole universe, in- 
cluding human intelligences, under the control of 
laws which are founded in wisdom, and which will 
in the end, work out the highest possible good for 
his creatures. These laws, they say, like their Au- 
thor, are fixed and unchangeable; and hence they 
can see no use in prayer. The machine has been 
wound up; the Being who made it and set it in 
operation has retired, and all that we can do is 
to stand in the places assigned us while this myste- 



Providence. 143 

rious clock of destiny runs on through the ages, and 
along the circuit of eternity. As one has quaintly 
said, the "world is turned into a great mill, estab- 
lished on certain principles, for the grinding out of 
certain results, and into the hopper all this great 
aggregate of individuals is poured like grain to be 
ground." This theory looks reasonable enough 
to superficial observers. It seems to them a log- 
ical deduction from the known principles of science. 
Thousands of them adopt it and taunt the humble 
believer in a watching and answering God with 
such questions as, " What good can you get through 
prayer that you would not get without prayer? What 
profit will it bring ? How can your God answer prayer 
now? What, in a word, is the use of praying at all?" 

I am free to say that when it can be scientifically 
demonstrated that law, which all admit is a thing 
born of the Almighty, has been put in his place 
and that no more effects can be wrought in this 
world than those which fall out in the way of ordi- 
nary and unhelped causation, I will then give up 
prayer. When that demonstration is made to my 
perfect satisfaction, as an honest man I will ac- 
knowledge that the New Testament is an amiable 
kind of book in its way, but one whose teachings 
will have become obsolete, and whose doctrines will 
have gone down before scientific refutation. 

There is not a reasonable doubt that God has 
placed matter and mind under a wise system of 
laws, that these laws are sufficient for all the ordi- 
nary purposes of life, and that a wise employment 
and application of them will add to the progress of 



144 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

the human race. These concessions are willingly 
made to science as one of the almoners of God's 
bounty. By all means, too, let men acquaint them- 
selves fully with these laws, for there is nothing in 
them adverse to revealed truth. In fact, men will 
never be as good Christians as they might be until 
they become more thoroughly acquainted with the 
laws of their being — until they understand how their 
bodies are put together, how their minds act, and 
how nature works. 

I rejoice in the belief that science is yet to be the 
grand interpreter of unrevealed truth, and that all 
the great characteristic elements of that truth will 
in the end be corroborated instead of harmed by 
the progress of natural science. I believe that this 
progress will lay a surer foundation for faith in 
God's active interference in human affairs than 
could have existed without it, and that in propor- 
tion as men become devoutly learned in science will 
their faith in prayer and in God's providence gain 
strength. I will even go so far as to concede fully 
that there are respects in which natural laws are 
beyond the reach of all human interference and 
control, and which no human want or prayer can 
change. There are, for instance, certain spheres in 
which light and heat cannot be changed; there 
are certain attractions which perform in their own 
way their own work, and which man has no power 
to reach or affect; and it is just as certain that 
there is in God's sj 7 stem of nature another class of 
laws which come close to us, and whose office is to 
minister to human life, under the volitions too of 



Providence. 145 

the human mind. Now then, these are either mod- 
ifications of great laws or they are laws distinct 
and separate. It matters not in which category 
you place them in this argument, for the point I 
make, as the ground and justification of prayer, is 
that these laws come within the range of human 
volition, and are made to perform certain functions 
as ministers to man through the power and influ- 
ence of prayer. 

I take this position now, and I beg you to ob- 
serve carefully its statement and to follow patiently 
its classification — namely, that God has made the 
agencies of nature which concern human life so 
that they are under the regulation and direction of 
the human mind; that in point of fact these agen- 
cies, or natural laws, can only be brought to their 
greatest possible fruitfulness and service when reg- 
ulated and directed by the. human mind; and it is 
in the maintenance of this position that I hope to 
satisfy you that there is nothing in the system of 
laws under which God has placed the universe of 
mind and matter to prevent his hearing and answer- 
ing the prayers of his creatures. Infidel science as- 
sumes the perfection of all natural laws, and upon 
this assumption she contends that prayer can do no 
good. If the assumption be true, the deduction is 
true also. The whole argument, then, turns upon 
whether or not natural law is perfect. I deny that 
it is, and hold that those natural laws which lie 
nearest to us, and which most intimately concern 
our daily happiness, can only be fully developed 
into fruitfulness by human volition. And now, to 
10 



146 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

prove this, let us look at some of these natural laws, 
some that we are familiar with, that we in a meas- 
ure understand — let us take up some of these and 
see if the human mind has not made them more 
fruitful of good to us than they were in their natu- 
ral state. 

1. Take first the law of electricity as an illustra- 
tion. This law has its own running grounds and 
pastures, as you all know, where nature allows it to 
disport itself without hinderance. In this wide field 
it does a great work — a work beyond human reach 
or knowledge — a work too of some profit to the 
system of nature in which it operates; but so far 
as the ordinary purposes of civilized life go, it does 
little or nothing for man until he masters it by vo- 
lition, and teaches it to serve him. Infidel science 
tells us that it is perfect in itself, and yet observa- 
tion shows you that not until human intelligence 
takes hold of it does it attain to any very great 
fruitfulness to human want and pleasure. Human 
intelligence has the power to take in hand this nat- 
ural law now, and without violating it at all, but 
simply by regulating and directing it, convert it into 
a great positive good. What was before lawless, 
and beyond control, becomes a patient drudge, run- 
ning swifter races for human convenience than were 
ever run before. It has in this way become a serv- 
ant to thought, so that now above the sea, and 
even under the sea, the law of electricity bears greet- 
ings from one nation to another, and performs an 
important office in civilization. 

2. Take the law of light as another illustration. 



Providence. 147 

In its natural state it is always at work, day and 
night — always running its journeys through the 
universe, always sending out its sun-flashes and its 
reflections of radiance from the faces of its moons, 
and when sun and moon are hid, making night 
holy with the trembling glory of stars. All this, 
though, is but its pastime, and the good done is 
general, and not special. It is only when man's 
mind seizes it that its ministrations become special 
and particular. Under the mastery of his volition 
it is brought into our dwellings; is reared along our 
coasts, so that great ships sail on securely in the 
dark and past dangerous reefs; is sent into the coun- 
try to gladden the home of the laborer, and into the 
halls of mirth and festivity where bright eyes flash 
and costly jewels sparkle in its splendor; into the 
chamber where the poet dreams and writes, and into 
the dungeon where the prisoner sighs and weeps. 
Man's mind takes the reins of this law in his hands, 
and does with it what Phaeton could not do — drives 
it whithersoever he will. He can also put in it the 
power of a living pencil, so that at his bidding it 
becomes an artist and paints all manner of beauti- 
ful pictures. He makes it a special and particular 
ministry to our wants, our tastes, and our pleasures. 
And yet, in the face of all this, the materialistic phi- 
losophy of the age has the effrontery to tell us that 
natural laws are perfect in themselves, and that we 
have no power to regulate and control them. What 
I have said shows to the satisfaction of the least 
child here that we do control them. 

3. Take water as the next illustration. It too 



148 Phil P. Neelys Sermons. 

has a certain round of grand effects, which it is for- 
ever performing without leave or license from man. 
It has its own lines of travel, which it keeps up with 
regularity and order. Some of these it is beyond 
human power to change. The ocean disdains his 
control, and will not wear his fette'rs. Its murmur- 
ings are the soft lyrics of its freedom, and the wild 
roar of its waves make up its thunder-shout of lib- 
erty. The old Polar Sea — the only mystery now 
left among the oceans of the globe — has rolled for 
ages, by day and night, in summer and winter, with 
no eye to watch it but God's. That mighty, unex- 
plored wilderness of mysterious water does what it 
will in its cold, dreary, sublime solitude. But inde- 
pendent of man as these empires of water may be, 
and are in many respects, it is nevertheless true 
that water is dependent on him for doing many 
things which it could not do but for his volition 
and intelligence. While it works for the general 
good, it is in unfettered obedience to its own laws; 
but when it works for the special benefit of man, it 
works under his control. He attempts no violation 
of its laws; he simply regulates them — forces them 
out of lines where nature set them running, and 
compels them into his service. In this way he 
draws water into canals, where vessels laden with 
commerce pass; causes it to convert barren heaths 
into fruitful gardens; brings it up through pipes 
into his chamber; sets it to turning machinery of 
every possible sort, and for the production of all 
possible things ; and makes of it a common highway 
for traffic among the peoples of the globe. Now, 



Providence. 149 

how many of these things could water do if the 
mind of man did not help it? The things which 
natural laws can do without human volition, after 
all that carping philosophers tell us, are neither so 
many nor so wonderful as the things they do, and 
can only do, under direction of human intelligence 
and will. 

4. Take heat as another illustration of the truth 
of my position. The sun stands in God's material 
system as the source of heat. It is the great fire- 
place of the universe, and its heat regulates the 
seasons. When you think of the warmth which 
this grand furnace is forever engendering, and of 
its adaptation to man's general good, you are awed 
into profound reverence at the wisdom of the Al- 
mighty; and yet, if you will compare what this law 
does in its general course with what it does under 
the dominion of man's mind — what it does, for in- 
stance, in the forge, in the stove and range, in the 
furnace which pours summer into our dwellings all 
the year round, in the locomotive along railroad 
tracks, in the factory where it turns innumerable 
wheels and spindles, in the steam-ship which with 
its lungs of fire and breath of flame plunges its 
way through storm and tempest to some distant 
mart — if you will compare the two, I say, you will 
be compelled to admit that great as is this law 
when running along the appointed channels of nat- 
ure, and as much as it may contribute to our com- 
fort and happiness, it is made increasingly great and 
useful when man's mind forces it to become a par- 
ticular ministry to human convenience and want. 



150 Phil. P. JSeely's Sermons. 

5. Look also at what the mind can do in regulat- 
ing the laws of nature so as to improve the charac- 
ter and value of her productions — her fruits and 
metals, for instance. Intelligence can take the com- 
mon crab-apple of the woods and by culture make 
it a nutritious and valuable fruit. Nature furnish- 
es the material, but mind shapes it into utility. 
Her mountains are filled with metals, but you 
might dig them all down and never find a plow, an 
ax, or a telescope ready made to hand and for use. 
She has the material, but she does not shape it iuto 
usefulness. When was she ever known to make a 
common jack-knife, or grate, or steam-engine? It 
takes mind, human intelligence and thought, to do 
this. She has great resources, and is a great general 
good, but it is ouly under man's control and regu- 
lation that her vast and inexhaustible supplies be- 
come special and particular ministers of good to the 
human race. 

Now, in this discussion I have ignored all meta- 
physical reasoning, and confined myself to familiar 
illustrations which show that while nature has a 
certain crude general function, which natural laws 
perform of themselves and without any regard to 
man, these laws are made to be vitalized and di- 
rected to a higher development and usefulness by 
the control and under the direction of the human 
mind and will. They show that the laws of the 
globe can be taken hold of by man's will and di- 
rected as really as he can take hold of and direct 
the laws of the body ; and that these secondary ef- 
fects of natural laws are just as much a part of their 



Providence. 151 

nature and are just as important as are the primary 
effects. 

What I contend for in this discussion is that 
while natural laws do in a certain way influence 
and control man, they are in the effects produced 
equally controlled by man, and equally dependent 
on him. In other words, it is clear to my mind 
that if nature were to abandon man, he would be 
ruined; and that if he were to abandon nature, the 
good she does would be general, and not special. 
Let nature forget his body, and his heart would 
cease to beat; let her forget the universe, and the 
pulsations of endless electrical currents would be 
suspended, and the result would be the stagnation 
of death. On the other hand, let man forget nat- 
ure, and her ministries of special good would cease 
at once. Let man stop regulating nature and con- 
trolling her laws so as to make her of use to him, 
and this goodly city would soon be a heap of brick 
and mortar — beautiful gardens would relapse into 
fields of thistles, the fruits of orchards would degen- 
erate into the crab-apple of the woods, cultivated 
seeds would return to their original poverty, and 
all the special good he has brought out of electrici- 
ty and light and water and heat would be lost to 
the world. All that I have said demonstrates that 
while man needs nature, nature needs man; and 
that it is his mind that brings her laws up to their 
fullest development and makes them fruitful of 
special good to his race. 

All this babble about the inflexibility and fixity 
of natural laws is against reason and facts. Man 



152 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

can and does control nature so as to make these 
laws a special ministry to him. And now I ask, If 
man can do this, cannot God who instituted these 
laws do it? Then, what becomes of that dogma of 
materialism which says that because the Almighty 
has placed his whole universe under a system of law 
prayer is a superstition of the Church ? If, a3 I have 
shown, it is in the power of the human mind to so 
control and direct natural laws as to make them 
minister directly to human want and convenience, 
in ways too which but for human intelligence they 
never would or could have done, is it not in the 
power of the Divine mind to do as much or more 
for his creatures in answer to their prayers? To 
deny this is to make man greater than the Al- 
mighty. Therefore, I hold — and I hold it not only 
because it is taught in the Bible, but because it ac- 
cords with reason — that there are millions of results 
that never would have taken place in the ordinary 
course of nature, but which are occurring every day 
and hour in answer to prayer. They are brought 
about by the mind of God in view of human needs 
and because of human entreaty. He brings them 
about too not by violating his laws, but by so con- 
trolling and directing them as to make them the 
channels of his beneficence to his needy chil- 
dren. This is my view of the doctrine of special 
providence, and it is my ground and warrant for 
prayer. 

brethren, I want you to take in the full force 
of my argument. Look at it now. By a wise use 
of natural laws man can make the earth fruitful, the 



Providence. 153 

seasons serviceable, the mountains useful, and the 
sea a convenience. He can seize upon natural laws, 
and without violating them, but simply by directing 
them, he can make them increase his fortune, add to 
his comfort, and promote his health. Now, if men 
can do this for themselves, cannot God do it for 
them ? If men can do this for their children, out of 
pure love and in answer to their desires, cannot and 
will not the Almighty God do as much for his dear 
children who cry to him out of the depths of their 
spiritual poverty and need? Therefore, I appeal to 
you who have honestly doubted the utility of prayer 
to know if there is any moral or scientific reason, 
or even probability, why God should not be able 
to hear and answer your prayer and mine when of- 
fered for a real good. That he is able to do it, you 
cannot deny; that he can do it consistently with 
his system of laws, I think I have made plain by 
my illustrations. And, now, that he will do it, de- 
pends upon how his children pray, and upon what 
they pray for. And this brings me to inquire brief- 
ly into the conditions on which his children may 
expect their prayers to be answered. 

In the first place, he will not, as a general thing, 
do for his children what they can do for themselves. 
You have no right to ask for any thing in opposi- 
tion to this rule. It is a part of his plan of training 
to make you put out the whole of your own strength 
first of all, which at last is only using his natural 
gifts; but when this fails, then you have a right, on 
certain other conditions, to call on him for help. 
One of these conditions is that you ought to do the 



154 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

thing you are trying to do, or that you really need 
the thing you ask for, and that you need it in the 
form you ask it. Of this he must be the judge, and 
hence all our askings should be in submission to 
his right to determine for us what we ought to do 
and what we really need. Another condition is 
that you do not ask him to do for you what, not- 
withstanding you are unable to do now of yourself, 
you may be able after a longer course of training to 
do. He has nowhere promised to do for us at pres- 
ent what we after a proper course of development 
will by and by have accruing strength to do for our- 
selves. These things explain why some of our 
prayers are never answered, and why others are so 
long being answered. Many of our most impas- 
sioned prayers are born in pure selfishness; are of- 
fered as dictations to the Almighty, as if we were 
sovereign and he merely our agent; are the plead- 
ings of our own judgments as to what we ought to 
do and have; while others are for strength wmich 
the Father sees it would be best for us to receive 
through the natural order of Christian develop- 
ment. In this last instance he has the power to do 
what we ask, but he delays for our good. He has 
the feeling too, for his love for us is tenderer than 
a mother's, and this very love often constrains him 
to withhold what in our ignorance we plead for. 
But if what you ask for approves itself to his father- 
ly wisdom and love as a real need, and he sees that 
having done what you could and failed, you come 
to him for help, he will give it. You have his word 
for this. You have examples in his Word of his 



Providence. 155 

having done this for his children of old, and if you 
are an experienced Christian your own life abounds 
with illustrations of this principle. You have the 
right to go up along the path of your weakness and 
say: "Father, 1 have done what I could; now hear 
my prayer, and do for me what I cannot do for my- 
self." And if it is for a thing really needed, and 
which the Father sees will be a blessing to you, he 
will answer your prayer sooner or later. 

Most of us do not understand what prayer really 
is. It is not demanding of God that he would give 
us what in our poor, imperfect judgment we think 
we need. It is asking him to give us what he 
knows we need. It is telling him that we are in 
want, that we look to him to have our wants sup- 
plied, and that we leave it to his infinite wisdom 
and goodness to choose the means and the time for 
supplying them. It is our privilege to tell him 
just what we think we need, but it must be in the 
spirit in which the Master presented his wants in 
the garden — the spirit that says at the end of all our 
askings, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou 
wilt." The true nature of prayer is to ask God to 
bless us, leaving him to determine as to what would 
be a blessing. Your little child, I will suppose, 
wants water. On your table perhaps is an inviting 
goblet, containing what resembles water, and what 
the child thinks is water, but what you know to be 
deadly poison. Your little darling entreats you for 
it, but you wisely refuse, knowing that it would 
bring death. Knowing that your child wants 
water, you remove what in its ignorance it took 



156 Phil. P. Ncely's Sermons. 

for water and hasten to bring it what it really 
wants. In this case you answer its prayer not in 
the way your child asked for an answer, but in a 
way that was wiser and for the child's good. And 
so will the Father in heaven answer the prayers of 
his children — not always giving them the things 
they ask for, but the things he sees they need, and 
at the time best for them. Therefore, the true 
spirit of prayer is a deep sense of want and a calm 
trusting, resting of the soul on God. It may have 
words, or it may be the silent adoration of love; it 
may voice itself in cries, or like the babe folded on 
the mother's heart, it may lead the soul to look its 
needs and its trust as it gazes into the face of the 
loving, watching Father. 

But I have detained you long enough, and can- 
not, as I intended, dwell on the exceeding profit of 
prayer. The great point was to show you that God 
is both able and willing to answer us when we pray, 
and that this in nowise comes in contact with the 
system of laws under which he has placed us all. 
My aim has been to get you to think out this ques- 
tion to its deep foundations for yourselves, so that 
you might see how impregnable are the defenses 
of our holy religion, and to show you that all ac- 
ceptable prayer must begin and end in submission. 
"Thy will be done" should be the girdle around 
all your askings; bound thus, you have only to 
lay them at the foot of the Throne in order to dem- 
onstrate every day of your lives the profitableness 
of prayer. There is an old rabbinical legend, illus- 
trative of prayer, which Longfellow has embodied in 



Providence. 157 

some beautiful lines, with which I will close this dis- 
course : Have you read in the Talmud of old, 
In the legends the rabbins have told, 

Of the limitless realms of the air; 
Have you read it — the marvelous story 
Of Sandalphon, the angel of glory — 

Sandalphon, the angel of prayer? 
How erect at the outermost gates 
Of the city celestial he waits 

With his feet on the ladder of light, 
That crowded with angels unnumbered 
By Jacob was seen as he slumbered 

Alone in the desert at night ? 
The angels of wind and of fire, 
Chant only one hymn, and expire 

With the song's irresistible stress; 
Expire in their rapture and wonder, 
As harp-strings are broken asunder 

By music they throb to express. 
But serene in the rapturous throng, 
Unmoved~by the rush of the song, 

With eyes unimpassioned and slow, 
Among the dead angels the deathless, 
Sandalphon stands listening breathless 

To sounds that ascend from below; 
From the spirits on earth that adore, 
From the souls that entreat and implore, 

In the fervor and passion of prayer ; 
From the hearts that are broken with losses, 
And weary with dragging their crosses, 

Too heavy for mortals to bear. 
And he gathers the prayers as he stands, 
And they change into flowers in his hands, 

Into garlands of purple and red ; 
And beneath the great arch of the portal, 
Through the streets of the city immortal, 

Is wafted the fragrance they shed. 



158 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

It is but a legend I know — 
A fable, a phantom, a show 

Of the ancient rabbinical lore; 
Yet the old mediaeval tradition, 
The beautiful, the strange superstition, 

But haunts me and holds me the more. 

When I look from my window at night, 
And the welkin above is all white, 

All throbbing and panting with stars, 
Among them majestic is standing 
Sandalphon the angel, expanding 

His pinions in nebulous bars; 

And the angel, I feel, is a part 

Of the hunger and thirst of the heart, 

The frenzy and fire of the brain, 
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden, 
The .golden pomegranates of Eden, 

To quiet its fever and pain. 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 



"Jesus said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and for- 
bid them not." Luke xviii. 16. 

I HAVE endeavored in a former discourse to 
show that under the Christian dispensation 
infants are entitled to membership in the Church 
of God, and that parents, in bringing them into the 
Church by baptism, place themselves under the 
most solemn obligation to bring them up in the 
nurture and admonition of the Lord. 

My remarks at this time will be intended for 
Christian parents who have entered their children 
into the school of Christ, and who, it is to be sup- 
posed, really desire their spiritual welfare. Now, 
while nothing is farther from their intention than 
the thought of alienating their children from Christ 
— while they are anxious to have them come to him, 
and would be shocked to think that they were in 
any way hindering their approach — while this is 
true, we say, of most Christian parents, it is equally 
true that many of them are in one way or another 
doing the very thing which, when you talk to them, 
they seem most anxious to guard against. They do 
not in so many words "forbid'' their children's 
becoming religious, yet their conduct, the man- 



160 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

agement^of their home affairs — in fact, their gen- 
eral course of life — is in very many cases a standing 
prohibition to the piety of their children. Their 
general line of policy becomes, contrary to all their 
really good intentions, an obstacle to this piety. 
Its tendency is to alienate their children from the 
Church, to embitter them against religion, to push 
them away from Christ, to discourage them in their 
attempts to think and act aright, and to drive them 
to the world for enjoyment. In this way there are 
thousands who, although they have had their chil- 
dren baptized, and really desire their salvation, do 
as effectually "forbid" them going to Christ as 
though they had in so many words actually com- 
manded them not to go. 

There are good and sufficient reasons, my breth- 
ren, why so many children of the Church ripen into 
men and women of the world; and these reasons, 
you may rest assured, lie outside of the grace of God, 
which, when reenforced by parental assiduity and 
faithful culture, will almost invariably make chil- 
dren "wise unto salvation" as they grow up. The 
fault is not in the gospel, nor in Christ, who is al- 
ways knocking at the door of the heart of child- 
hood and begging admittance; the fault is in us, 
to whose training childhood has been committed. 
We do not rise to a proper appreciation of the 
awful responsibilities that gather about the rela- 
tion of parent and child. We do not sufficient- 
ly study — earnestly and prayerfully study — our 
duty as parents; we do not devote ourselves 
to its performance. We give too much thought 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 161 

and time and toil to the temporal welfare of our 
children, and too little to their spiritual well-being. 
We do not look into the peculiarities of childhood, 
nor think of the variety of character it presents — a 
variety often seen in our own households ; and as 
a consequence our government is often wanting in 
adaptability. Some of us are too indulgent ; others 
are too severe; while others still are both indulgent 
and severe, just as the mood inclines them. In 
short, we act so as to give our children a discour- 
aged feeling, and sometimes a bitter, prejudiced 
feeling in reference to religion; and although we 
may not in so many words "forbid" their coming 
into the Church by a public profession of faith in 
Christ, our daily conduct constitutes a standing 
barrier to their salvation. I know these are grave 
charges, but I honestly believe them well founded; 
and if they are true, and you are a good Christian, 
you will rejoice to have them pointed out to you. 
If you are an honest Christian, and as such ardently 
desire to see your children pious, you will love the 
preacher who shows you the wrong which you may 
be doing unconsciously, and will address yourself 
to the work of correcting it when it is discovered. 
Therefore, I propose to point out a few of the most 
common ways by which parents are unintentionally 
forbidding their children from going to Christ. 

Childhood is the period of susceptibility, of ten- 
derness of impulse, of imitativeness, and requires to 
be treated with exceeding delicacy and kindness in 
order to its religious development. It is the in- 
stinct of nature for children to look up to their 
11 



162 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

parents and to regard them with reverence, for each 
child to think his parents superior to all others. 
His father is his type of courage and capacity, while 
his mother is his model of love and goodness. I 
need not pause here to show you how natural it is, 
in a relation of this kind, for the parental tone and 
spirit to flow down upon the child as the sunlight 
falls upon the opening flower, and for it to enter 
into all his future life. Now then, in this tender re- 
lation impressions go out from parents and are taken 
in by children. The one gives, the other receives; 
and this giving and this receiving, in the matter of 
impressions, of thoughts, of opinions, and of habits, 
are going on all through childhood, so that when the 
child matures into the man he takes with him into 
the busy scenes of life the parental impress, and as 
a general thing is good or evil just as the tone and 
spirit of the parents were good or evil. He stands 
there a devout Christian or a hardened sinner, just 
as they molded him in childhood. Just as they 
led him to Christ or forbade his going will be man- 
ifest in manhood the good or evil tendencies of his 
character. How important, then, that as parents you 
give earnest heed while I attempt to discover to 
you how without intending it you may be alienat- 
ing your children from the ways of piety ! 

Paul, in giving advice to Christian parents, says, 
" Provoke not your children to anger, lest they be 
discouraged," in which he seems to have alluded to 
children who are in the more advanced stages of 
childhood, or in what we call the period of youth; 
yet his advice will hold good as to my little chil- 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 163 

dren. We learn from it that if parents would not 
discourage their children from piety, they must avoid 
those provocations to auger, which often spring from 
the most trivial causes, and which generally grow 
out of their own ungoverned and groundless pas- 
sion. And this habit of anger, while it is one of 
the most common of domestic evils, is one whose 
influence is most potent in keeping children away 
from the path of piety. It becomes this by that 
hardening process which it is sure to produce, and 
which is so successful in resisting the influence of 
God's Spirit; and what makes it worse is the fact 
that parents sometimes make it a part of the relig- 
ious nurture of their children. They make it a 
point of duty to fly into a passion, to brew a storm 
of indignation at every misdemeanor or childish 
vagary of their children, in order, as they seem to 
think, to properly impress the wrong-doers with the 
magnitude of their offenses. There are multitudes 
of Christian fathers who never attempt to correct 
their children until urged to it by passion, and there 
are just as many mothers who cause their children 
to grow up in a climate of storms, and who make it 
a part of their religion to keep up a perpetual war- 
fare in their household. From morning till noon, 
and from noon till night, from the cradle up to child- 
hood, and from childhood up to manhood, home is 
made resonant with the voice of scolding, until the 
higher nature of their children is completely worn 
down and they sink into a sort of atrophy which is 
the very essence of all discouragement. They bear 
its legible imprint in their little faces, in their averted 



164 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

eyes, in the forlorn expression of their countenances, 
in their frightened look and shy manner. These 
things all testify that continued outbursts of parent- 
al peevishness and passion have effectually destroyed 
every thing hopeful and good in their young souls, 
and that they sit and talk and eat and sleep and 
live in a perpetual dread of a father's fierce indig- 
nation or a mother's turbulent temper. 

The glad, joyous impulses of childhood constitute 
the Godward side of the soul; but when these are 
dried up, as they often are, in the furnace — the ever- 
burning furnace — of parental peevishness and petu- 
lance and passion, there is nothing left in the child- 
ish soul that can reach out after God. It relapses 
into sullenness and indifference; and a bitter preju- 
dice against the religion of such parents is the in- 
evitable consequence. 

Another common way of discouraging children, 
which many otherwise very good parents fall into, 
is the habit of laying too many prohibitions upon 
their children. Having given them to God in bap- 
tism, and wishing to do their whole duty by them, 
they demand and expect too much. Their religious 
nurture is made up of innumerable and never- 
ending forbiddings, under which childhood becomes 
impatient, and its little warm, quick-beating heart 
grows restive, and sometimes rebellious. Parental 
authority is converted into a towering Sinai, from 
which the child hears nothing but "Thou must not 
do this, and thou must not do that," until in his lit- 
tle wayward heart he begins to despise a religion in 
which, as his parents have taught it to him, there is 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 165 

no bright spring-time, no bursting bud nor opening 
flower, no bloom nor fragrance, nothing but hard, 
dry self-denial and duty. Such a child lives under 
a kind of sledge-hammer of commandment, which 
as fast as he attempts to rise beats him back to the 
ground; and the result is that by the time he passes 
into early youth, and under a more loving and 
genial training would be inclined to make a public 
profession of his faith in Christ, he has learned to 
heartily despise that faith, and rejoices that the 
time has come when he can escape from its inces- 
sant prohibitions. The better course for the parent 
to pursue is to forbid as few things as possible, and 
then enforce what is forbidden. He should never 
forget that his child is a child, and that what in 
manhood he might accept voluntarily is most dis- 
tasteful to him in childhood. He should study to 
present the brighter and more beautiful aspects of 
religion, and in this way win the child's heart to the 
love and service of God. There is no surer way of 
alienating childhood from religion than this perpet- 
ual plying it with prohibitions. Rather, teach it the 
power of love, and you will have called forth its af- 
fections ; and when these are won, all the rest will 
follow in their order. 

Another effectual way of forbidding children to 
come to Christ is to be found in that principle of ab- 
solutism which some Christian parents adopt in the 
government of their children. They govern them in 
a hard, unfeeling, despotic way, as though they were 
machines instead of intelligent souls. They make 
their word law, as every parent should; but they do 



166 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

it in such a harsh, overbearing manner as to com- 
pletely reduce the filial relation, which is so suggest- 
ive of tenderness and sympathy and love, into one 
of absolute serfdom. The father now is the child's 
type of God: hence any thing that opens a breach 
between the father and the child, that puts the 
child from him in the matter of feeling, of love and 
sympathy — any thing that does this will in the very 
same proportion shut the child awa}^ from that God 
of whom the father is a type. Now then, if the 
baptized child sees in his father these elements of 
tyranny, he will naturally think of God as a tyrant, 
and will drink in a prejudice against religion. If his 
father's rule is the rule of a despot, his approaches 
to him will be rare, and when made at all will be 
made in fear and trembling; and all this will give 
color to his apprehensions of the Father in heaven. 
The very guilelessness and openness of the heart of 
childhood naturally impart to it a beautiful cour- 
age in its approaches to God, and it is this that 
makes the time of childhood so ingenuously open 
to religion ; yet if through parental tyranny and 
despotism this courage be changed to a feeling of 
dread and abject submission, children will think of 
God only with a feeling of fear, and they will re- 
coil from him as from a harsh and cruel tyrant. 
Remember, then, that as you impress upon your 
children ideas of your fatherhood, so will be their 
ideas of the Father in heaven; and that if you 
teach them to look upon you with feelings of awe 
on ly — to shrink from your presence, to regard you as 
a foe to their happiness, to contemplate you simply 



Forbidding Children to Gome to Christ. 167 

as an impersonation of authority — they will have the 
same apprehension of God. When this feeling of 
dread takes possession of the heart of childhood, 
through parental instrumental^} 7 , there is little or 
no hope of witnessing its early consecration to God. 
When parents by their sternness forbid the early 
piety of their children, they so alienate them from 
spiritual things, and so weaken their faith, that no 
presentation of the gentleness and love of Christ, 
which as Christians they may offer their children 
in after years, can reassure the broken courage of 
the soul. That courage will be gone — will have 
been put out by parental severity, by household 
despotism, by a tyranny in which there was no 
sympathy with childhood, no tenderness, no love, 
no confidence; and the wickedness of the children 
will in the great day of account be laid at the door 
of parents who by this principle of domestic abso- 
lutism will have as effectually forbidden their chil- 
dren to go to Christ as they would had they sternly 
commanded them not to go. 

Incessant fault-finding is another way of forbid- 
ding them. Now, the love of approbation, which is 
a part of human nature, is never stronger than in 
childhood; and nothing so discourages the child in 
its efforts to do right as the bad habit which par- 
ents fall into of blaming it for every trivial fault of 
which it may be guilty. Children many times com- 
mit mistakes and fall into errors from inexperience 
and ignorance, and while they are trying to do 
right. Besides this, childhood is the age of impulse 
and of activity, and may be expected to make many 



168 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

sad mistakes, without intending to make them; 
and the error of many parents is an indiscrimi- 
nate condemnation of every thing their children do. 
They seem to think it a matter of true faithfulness 
that they he not too easily pleased lest their chil- 
dren should take up loose impressions of the strict- 
ness of duty. They do not deal with their children 
in this respect as God deals with them. Notwith- 
standing their unfaithfulness to him, their short- 
comings, their faults, and their mistakes, he smiles 
upon them for what he sees them trying to do, and 
encourages them thus to still greater efforts; and 
in this he exemplifies the course we should pursue 
with our imperfect and erring children. The par- 
ent who is forever finding fault with his child, 
who will be satisfied with nothing short of perfec- 
tion, who will see nothing good in his child as long 
as he beholds any thing evil in him, who from a 
mistaken apprehension of duty closes his mouth 
against all commendation, and is eager only to con- 
demn — the parent, we say, who does this, whether 
he intends it or not, is pursuing a course that will 
keep his children away from Christ. 

There are some parents who not only find fault 
with and fail to commend their children, but who 
keep up a show of displeasure, when their children 
do wrong, long after the wrong has been acknowl- 
edged, for the purpose, as they allege, of preventing 
its repetition; and this too is a habit which preju- 
dices the mind of childhood against religion. It is 
certainly proper for parents to show displeasure at 
wrong-doing; but when it takes the form of a 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 169 

grudge, and is continued after the wrong is repent- 
ed of, its effect is to harden the heart of the child 
into sullen aversion, and to make him think of God 
as one to whom the same tariff of displeasure is to 
be paid all through life; and when this comes to be 
the settled thought of childhood, it leaves no room 
for early piety. 

Again, that miserable anxiety about their chil- 
dren which some parents are forever showing, and 
by which their children are kept in an eternal tor- 
ment, of repression, becomes a hinderance to early 
piety. Just think what a torture it would be to 
you to stay a week or to take a journey with one of 
these anxious, nervous, fidgety people, who are always 
climbing mountains before they are reached, always 
anticipating some trouble or misfortune, forever on 
the lookout for some terrible happening ! Then, 
what think you of the children of these kind of peo- 
ple — the hapless little ones who are shut up with 
them day by day and year by year, who all through 
childhood have to listen to this monotone of anxie- 
ty, this unceasing whine of foreboding and fear? 
How otherwise than overcast with clouds can their 
sky become, because of this continual worrying 
and fretting on the part of their parents ? If such 
children do not catch the infection, which is most 
likely, they will be apt to run to the other extreme 
of recklessness and defiance, and disrespect to such 
parents. And if the worry of their parents has been 
of a religious cast, it will plant bitterness in the 
child's heart toward a religion which has been com- 
mended to him only in groans and with faces long 



170 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

with sanctimonious austerity and anxious with a 
sort of chronic care. Nothing will make religion 
so repulsive to a child as to have it urged upon 
him in a whining and misgiving way — as to make 
the voice of parental solicitude a sort of bagpipe 
melody, to which he listens until it becomes a tor- 
ment. The parent who would not discourage his 
child must avoid this rock. He must make his 
child feel that although there are dangers ahead 
he trusts him and has confidence that he will con- 
quer them. He may be anxious for him, he may 
and ought to be burdened with prayer for him, 
yet he must take on hope and confidence, and by a 
manifestation of these in himself awaken them in 
his child, who from self-respect will then exert him- 
self to meet the expectations of his trusting par- 
ents. But if this range of adventure is curtailed, 
if you withhold this trust, and give way to a fret- 
ting anxiety that becomes a torture to your child — 
never letting him play for fear that he will get hurt, 
never losing sight of him for fear of some accident, 
binding him perpetually to the end of the apron- 
string, and trusting him in nothing — if you pursue 
this nervous, anxious, worrying policy with your 
child, you are fencing him oft" from piety more cer- 
tainly than if you were to interdict it with your lips. 
Another effectual way of forbidding early piety 
consists in an application of tests of character which 
are not appropriate to childhood. The very best of 
parents fall into this error; and what is worse, they 
make it a part of the religious training of their 
children. The child, for instance, under some prov- 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 171 

ocation loses his temper. Now, good temper being 
a test of Christian character, and having been be- 
trayed into a momentary loss of his, the parent 
charges upon him that he has a bad heart, and goes 
straight to work to convince him that he is not a 
Christian child. What is the result? Why, the 
child gives up all effort to be religious. He ceases 
to pray, or if he prays it is with a feeling of misgiv- 
ing and distrust, of alienation and dawning enmity 
to God and religion. Now, that parent we will sup- 
pose is a Christian, and to the child he is a type of 
the Father above. What he says the child believes, 
and this charge of irreligion upon the child, because 
of a momentary loss of temper, takes away hope, and 
oftentimes drives the child into despair and wick- 
edness. Ah, Christian parents, where would be 
your hope if God were to hold you to the same 
strict account? If your child, so little practiced in 
self-government, is to be condemned for every irri- 
tation and loss of temper, how ought God to judge 
you for not preserving that uniform serenity which 
is easier to your riper years than the self-control 
you look for in your little child is to him ? You for- 
get, when on the holy Sabbath you condemn your 
child and charge him with being a bad boy be- 
cause you witness in him an overeagerness for 
play, or an inattention to his Sunday-school lesson — 
you forget, when you sternly condemn him for such 
natural errors as these, that you, who have outgrown 
your love of play in your love of gain, were troubled 
all through the sermon, and even as you knelt at 
the communion-table, with some worldly enterprise 



172 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

which, notwithstanding all your efforts to put it 
away, would keep thrusting itself before you in the 
house of God; you forget this when you make the 
joyful ebullience of your child conclusive proof 
against the religiousness of his impulsive heart. 
Do not forget it in the future, and when you re- 
member it, be slow to condemn your child for what 
is less sinful in him than this worldliness is in you. 
If sometimes the little child is carried away by ex- 
uberant life and playfulness, is that as bad as being 
cankered by the love of gain, or absorbed by the 
desires of a grasping, eager, worldly manhood? 
The balances, if rightly adjusted, will be found 
against manhood and in favor of childhood; for the 
sins of childhood are open and ingenuous, and 
should be judged leniently, while the sins of man- 
hood are sins of gravity, of prudence, of self-seek- 
ing, of an age which wears or ought to wear the 
aspect of sobriety and dignity, and should therefore 
be the more severely judged. Now then, if man- 
hood is not to be accounted as destitute of piety, 
because it has its faults and failings, does not this 
manhood commit a grievous wrong when it con- 
demns childhood as wholly irreligious because of 
faults and failings which are natural to its period? 
I do not believe that God judges children in this 
way, and therefore I hold that it is wrong in par- 
ents to assume that even wayward children have no 
piety, and to charge this lack upon them because 
they are not as perfect as the angels in heaven. 
They will often err, for to err is human; they 
may, and no doubt often do, falter — yet if they give 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 173 

evidence that they love what is good, and are trying 
to be good, there is just as good reason to hope that 
their hearts have been touched by the Spirit of God 
as there is to hope that you, their parents, whose 
service of God is full of imperfection, are striving 
to follow the leadings of that Spirit. We must 
judge children as children and be careful not to 
discourage them by telling them that they are nec- 
essarily without any religion because they are fond 
of play, and are often found stumbling and faltering 
in their efforts to do right. Brethren, this is true 
of us all. We are none of us perfect. We all 
stumble and falter sometimes. The best we can do 
is to try to do right and to keep trying. Let this 
spirit run through your entire treatment of chil- 
dren. If your child in trying to be religious makes 
mistakes, as he certainly will — if in his efforts to 
walk in the ways of the Lord you see him halting 
sometimes, and even falling prone upon the ground 
— do not upbraid him, but do as your Heavenly Fa- 
ther does with you: help him to get up again, tell 
him to lean upon you, offer him your support, make 
your course toward him an illustration of the for- 
giving, loving, helping nature of God; and then 
you may expect that as your child grows in years 
he will grow in piety. But if you pursue the oppo- 
site course, your whole life and treatment of him 
will have but one tendency, and that will be to for- 
bid his coming to Christ. 

I cannot close this brief and incomplete enumer- 
ation of parental errors without alluding to anoth- 
er, which is almost universal in our Christian de- 



174 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

nomination. I allude to the common disposition 
among parents to deny to their baptized children 
an early recognition of their membership in the 
Church, and an admission to the holy sacrament. 
This cautious exclusion of the children of the 
Church from all the privileges of the Church 
is, as I honestly think, a great mistake, and re- 
sults in most cases in their total abandonment to 
the world. The parent that adopts and pursues it 
does, beyond all question, forbid children to come 
to Christ. If what we have said in a former dis- 
course as to infant membership in the Church be 
true, it holds parents bound to bring their children 
into the Church by a public profession of their faith 
and their admission to the table of the Lord just as 
soon as they are old enough to comprehend the 
nature and responsibilities of that profession and 
show a desire to be religious ; and if this were done, 
our children would learn religion from their infan- 
cy, just as they learn other things. God will do his 
part if we do ours. It is our neglect here — our 
criminal and sinful neglect at this point — that is 
driving our children from the Church into the 
world. The child, no matter how mature his 
mind, nor how beautiful his piety, is held back 
from a public profession of his faith because, as we 
think, he is too young to make it, as if years were 
one of the Scripture evidences of grace. We want 
him to wait for an experience — a change — for what 
we call conversion, notwithstanding we gave him to 
God in infancy by baptism, have been assiduous in 
his religious training, and have been praying daily 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 175 

for his regeneration. We seem to have no faith 
in all we have done, no confidence that God will 
have fulfilled his part of the covenant Although 
we have had our children baptized, we still virtu- 
ally keep thern outside of the fold, to see if they 
can stand the weather — waiting for an experience 
which, if we have done our duty, has been going 
on gradually and imperceptibly from the first lisp- 
ing cry of infancy up to the moment when the child 
comes to us perhaps, and says, "Father, when shall 
I be old enough to be a Christian V 9 To tell that 
child to wait is to forbid him to come to Christ; 
and this is just what thousands are doing. I know 
of nothing so chilling and disheartening to child- 
hood as this. It makes a mockery of baptism. It 
neutralizes all that you have done to educate your 
child religiously. It closes the door of the Church 
to him. It thrusts him away from the communion. 
It breaks down his courage, destroys his hope, 
crushes out his longings to be good, and sends him 
adrift upon the world, without God and without 
hope. it is treatment the most unnatural and 
cruel, and its commonness explains why so few 
children of our Communion even so much as think 
of reaffirming the vows made for them by parents 
at their baptism, until they have gone on in sin 
and folly long enough to call for bitter repentance 
and a sudden conversion. O my brethren, I tell 
you again, there is a better way, and that as a 
Church we should seek to find it. Bring your 
children up in the nurture and admonition of the 
Lord, and encourage them to an early profession of 



176 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

their faith in Christ. Do not wait for any particular 
age. Some are prepared for it at seven; and as a 
general rule no parent has done his duty whose 
baptized child goes beyond twelve without formal- 
ly entering into the Church of Christ and coming 
to the communion. The longer I live the more 
deeply impressed I am with the necessity of lead- 
ing childhood into an open Christian profession, 
and of making religion as much a thing of edu- 
cation and early training as any other great in- 
terest of life. To keep your child back from an 
open profession of religion is to discourage the very 
beginnings of godliness, and in nine case out often 
will put hinderances in the way of his salvation from 
which he will never fully recover. 

There are many other ways by which parents 
forbid the early piety of their children; but we 
have not time to point them out. We have men- 
tioned enough to make it no wonder that the chil- 
dren of our Church should either go to the world 
or to other communions, where they hope to find a 
sympathy which was denied them at home. And 
what astonishes us is that when we would inaugu- 
rate a system of religious worship, as we are trying 
to do here, that would meet the demands and grat- 
ify the taste of the cultivated youth of this age, 
those very parents whose rigid adherence to old and 
effete non-essentials in religion has driven their 
children off' into other Churches are the only ones 
who oppose it. They are not satisfied with forbid- 
ding their own children from entering the Church, 
but seem resolutely set in the purpose of keeping 



Forbidding Children to Come to Christ. 177 

as many more out as they possibly can, rather than 
give up their prejudices. While the Church abounds 
with such parents, we need not marvel that its chil- 
dren wander away into the world, or into other com- 
munions; but in the day of judgment there will 
be terrible reckoning with those who forbade their 
coming in. There are times in every religiously 
educated childhood when it is open to the calls of 
religion. These may be called its flowering sea- 
sons, and they will certainly ripen into fruitfulness 
if the flowers are not broken off by rough handling 
or discouraging treatment. If these religious affin- 
ities are rudely battered down by parental discour- 
agement, there is but one other alternative, and that 
is the world ; and our children, driven away from 
religion by our mistreatment, will not be slow to 
try its promises and to test its enjoyments. 

brethren, when I think how prone we all are 
to treat childhood as if piety were impossible to it ; 
when I recall our misuse, our misconception, our 
misdirection of its capabilities; when I think of the 
many and subtle ways in which we forbid our chil- 
dren to come to Christ, when their longing hearts are 
yearning to come — I do not wonder that so many of 
them go astray; and my prayer is that as a Church, 
no matter how others do, you will from henceforth 
do all you can to bring them under the protection 
and guidance of Him who said, "Suffer" them " to 
come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is 
the kingdom of God." 
12 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 



" So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that 
smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil, saying, 
It is ready for the soldering; and he fastened it with nails, 
that it should not be moved." Isaiah xli. 7. 

" I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be 
content." Philippians iv. 11. 

MY purpose in addressing you this evening, 
young gentlemen, will be to show that the 
present constitution of things requires a diversity 
of occupations in society, and that when a young 
man has decided what vocation he intends follow- 
ing he should address himself to its duties in a 
spirit of contentment, and with that fixed purpose 
and determination which, if adhered to, will, as a 
a general rule, crown human efforts with success. 

This diversity of occupations is seen in the first 
of the passages of Scripture read, where the carpen- 
ter is represented as encouraging the goldsmith, and 
he that smoothed with the hammer as cheering on 
him that smote the anvil; while the declaration of 
the apostle, "I have learned, in whatsoever state I 
am, therewith to be content," furnishes an illus- 
tration of the spirit in which we should accept and 
perform our lots and duties in life. 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 179 

From these scriptures, and from what I have 
said to you in other discourses, young gentlemen, 
you will readily apprehend my object in attempting 
to showyou how necessary it is, in our existing so- 
cial constitution, that there should be a variety in 
pursuits and labor, and how equally necessary it is 
for each worker to bring into his occupation such a 
respect for it as will make him content with it; for 
to be without this respect is to be discontented, and 
to be discontented in an occupation is to be unwor- 
thy of it, and will bring inevitable failure. 

There is, I know, and would have you remember, 
a certain disquiet which lies at the foundation of all 
success — a dissatisfaction with what we are and 
with what we do, and a longing to ascend in the 
scale of being and doing — a discontent that is 
divine in its origin, and "from which all growth 
in excellence proceeds." It is an element of 
power, an evidence of capability, and has its 
birth in the highest and purest inspirations that 
visit the soul. It is a movement, so to speak, 
that runs through all life — vegetable, animal, 
and rational — and its instinctive tendency is up- 
ward. Go out into the fields of nature, and there 
you will see that every thing is growing, climbing, 
reaching, and towering upward. The great oak, 
with its centennial crown of leaves, stretches its 
knotted arms and waves its long palms toward the 
overhanging clouds. The vine — like tender, de- 
pendent woman — searches for supporting strength, 
and clasping it with passionate fondness pulls itself 
upward by its delicate fingers. The meek violet, 



180 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

as it sits in lowly and maidenly modesty, turns its 
blue eyes toward the sky, and breathes its fragrant 
wishes heavenward. Even the little lake in the 
grassy meadow dreams of stars, and has its own 
bright firmament where the lily on its margin mir- 
rors its beautiful face. It is as if God had said to 
every animated thing on its entrance into life : 
"Look up! for there, far above every thing, shines 
the great white throne ; there sits the uncreate per- 
fection ; there abides the source of all blessedness ; 
there burns the ineffable fire, at which the torches 
of all life are lighted. Look up ! for by upward look- 
ing and longing and striving you are to rise to per- 
fection." There is a discontent, then, that comes 
from God, and obedience to it is obedience to him, 
and will be found a grand element of success in any 
chosen line of life. There is a disquiet, though, 
which may grow into a disgust for that line of life 
— a dissatisfaction amounting to contempt for one's 
lot in life, and for the labors to which the plain 
hand of Providence sometimes points — which if not 
guarded against will dig the grave of indolence and 
bury in it energies which if perseveringly expended 
will make even the humblest necessary pursuit in 
life an honor and a success. It is a discontent that 
has no faith, no hope, no courage, no perseverance, 
and being without faith in God and out of harmony 
with the order and operations of his providence, it 
will make a man unsuccessful in any occupation, in 
any profession, pursuit, or trade into which he per- 
mits it to come. 
Now then, in the hope that I may be able to as- 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 181 

sist you in putting away that bad habit of com- 
plaining at what men call their hard lot in life, 
which all of us are in danger of contracting, and in 
encouraging you to go forward bravely and manfully 
in the discharge of the legitimate duties of that lot, 
and with the sublime determination that, God help- 
ing you, you will so act in your occupation as to 
compel the world to respect it — in this hope, this 
earnest desire, I ask your attention, young gentle- 
men, to what is to follow. 

I begin, then, by reminding you that the structure 
of society necessarily demands a variety of industrial 
pursuits — requires the carpenter, the goldsmith, the 
smoother with the hammer, and the smiter on the 
anvil. Society is in one sense an organized system 
of widely differing but mutually depending duties. 
It is a vast and vitalized machinery with manifold 
and diverse cogs and wheels and fixtures, and all 
necessary to the ongoing of the social machine. It 
is made up of innumerable departments, many of 
them unlike many others, yet each having a legiti- 
mate relation with all the others, and essential to 
the general harmony, creating a variety of pursuits, 
and making this very variety contribute to the 
unity which crowns the whole. Some, for instance, 
have to sow, and some have to spin; some must 
teach, and some must learn; some must open the 
furrow and plant the seed and gather the crop; 
some must wield the hammer, and some must 
drive the plane; some have to make laws, and some 
must execute them; some must stand in the pulpit, 
some in the courts of justice, and some at the bed- 



182 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

side of the sick. Society, as I have said, is a great 
complicated structure, and requires a variety of pro- 
fessions and pursuits to keep it going. Even its 
individual enterprises can come to completion only 
by contributions from more than one of these pur- 
suits. Take the imposing structure across the 
street there, recently built, as an illustration of the 
number of occupations that contribute even to one 
building. First, there was the architect who drew 
the plan ; then came the carpenter to fit the timbers 
together, the foundry to prepare the iron and nails 
that go in it, the skill that molded the bricks, the 
labor that placed them upon the scaffold, the mason 
that laid them in their places, the glazier with his 
glass, and the painter with his brush and colors. 
What a number of occupations were necessary to 
its erection and preparation for use ! Did you 
think this morning, when you read the Advertiser or 
the Tribune, how many varieties of labor were nec- 
essary to the publication of a newspaper? Just 
think of it now. It requires an editor, with his 
hard-toiling brain-work; a local, who in addition 
to brains has to wear out shoe-leather hunting up 
startling items to aid in the digestion of your 
breakfast; the skill of the compositor; the work of 
the pressman, to bring the paper out; the newsboy 
to distribute it — to say nothing of the machinery, 
of paper-mills, and manufacturers of ink and type, 
and a hundred other things belonging to a printing 
establishment, all of which contribute to your morn- 
ing's enjoyment of a daily newspaper. And so I 
might bring from every department of business il- 






Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 183 

lustrations of the fact that not even an individual en- 
terprise can be carried on without the aid of one or 
more of the industrial pursuits of life. This proves 
that this diversity of pursuits is a necessity, and 
that without it there can be no social progress. 

N"ow then, these necessary pursuits must all be 
filled by somebody. They are absolute necessities; 
and I hold that whatever is an absolute necessity is 
inherently honorable in itself and in its ends, and 
that therefore any man who does his duty in any 
necessary calling or pursuit in life is worthy of the 
esteem and respect of all good men. 

I am ashamed to acknowledge that the popular 
sentiment in this country is against the respectabil- 
ity of hand-labor, and that as a people we do not 
sufficiently estimate this kind of toil. The effect 
of this unjust standard of respectability is that our 
young men seek to evade certain kinds of necessa- 
ry labor and certain pursuits, not so much from an 
aversion to the toil they bring, but from a want of 
that courage that would dare the injustice and the 
frowns of such as look down upon this kind of la- 
bor with a false feeling of contempt, as if it were 
dishonorable in a young man to do any work nec- 
essary to the good of" society, or to follow in the 
footsteps of the blessed Christ, who for thirty years 
worked as a common carpenter in the village of 
Nazareth. It is this undervaluation of necessary 
occupations in this country that causes so many 
young men to avoid them and to seek to get a liv- 
ing in ways ignoble and of questionable honesty, 
rather than by hard, honest hand-labor. When 



184 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

public opinion pronounces this kind of toil to be 
wanting in respectability, young men are frightened 
from it, and are driven into speculations of doubtful 
propriety, or to the gaming-table, or to professions 
for which they have no qualifications; and the con- 
sequence is that multitudes of them are either with- 
out employment or engaged in pursuits to which 
they are not adapted, and which, even if they were, 
are not half so intrinsically creditable as is the call- 
ing of the carpenter, the goldsmith, or the man who 
smites the anvil. The consequence of this prevail- 
ing opinion is an aversion to industrious labor and 
a general rush into those schemes which acquire 
wealth without earning it, and which are not equal 
in respectability to the calling that seeks it by the 
honest sweat of the face. 

No business, no pursuit, no profession that does 
not produce something can claim to be a positive 
social good, and hence every pursuit or calling that 
aims to acquire wealth without giving to society its 
equivalent is founded on the principle of social 
dishonesty. Society may, and often does, tolerate 
them; those who practice them may, and sometimes 
do, get offended when the pulpit rebukes them; yet 
while God gives me power to speak, I will stand up 
in my place and denounce them as unjust, unfair, 
and as dishonest; for no matter who engages in 
them or countenances them, they are these and 
nothing else. Understand me now, I do not mean 
by this that trade, or an exchange of one thing for 
another, is dishonest. There is, as I believe, a le- 
gitimate business of mediation and interchange be- 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 185 

tween producers and consumers, and a legitimate 
service accruing to both by virtue of it. This is 
the basis and the advantage of trade and commerce, 
and neither has in itself nor does it necessarily lead 
to dishonesty; but farther than this, I contend that 
whoever by speculation acquires wealth without 
paying some equivalent, gets something for noth- 
ing; and this, I hold, is dishonesty. The man who 
gains his wealth in some necessary and honest oc- 
cupation, no matter how humble it may be, is far 
more entitled to respectability than is the man who, 
too proud to work with his hands, seeks to acquire 
wealth without honestly earning it. 

Now then, if what has been said as to the social 
necessity there is for a variety of pursuits be true, 
and if you have selected your calling and have en- 
tered upon its duties, the lesson which of all others 
it is most important for you to learn is that of con- 
tentment and diligence. It is a common thing for 
men to complain at what they call their lot in life — 
to think that some other lot or calling would suit 
them better, would be better adapted to them, and 
give promise of larger success. Sometimes they go so 
far as to call in question the providence that has ap- 
pointed them to their positions, and to fly from them. 
They have not learned, like the apostle, to accept 
their allotments with thankfulnesss ; to enter upon 
them with resignation, with a feeling of respect for 
them, and with the determination to be successful 
in them. They forget that the great springs from 
which the soul is fed have their source not in our vo- 
cations, nor in our surroundings, but in God and in 



186 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

ourselves ; and that if in the order of his providence 
it is theirs to toil in low places, as the world has it, 
he can make their happiness as great as though the 
world's eye was on them. They forget that the 
variety of work to be done calls for a corresponding 
variety of workers, and that the great object of the 
laborer should be to accept his place and do his 
work faithfully. His business is to fall into his 
place, to perform its duties, and to look to the great 
Overseer for his reward. 

Now then, if your pursuit in life be a necessary 
one, and you follow it faithfully, you have a right to 
expect that it will honor you; and so it will in the 
eye of God and of all good men. In the dispensa- 
tion of his rewards there is no difference between 
the king and those who smite the anvil. What 
he looks for is fidelity to trust, and wherever this 
is found, waving above it will be seen his crown of 
recompense, ready and waiting to be given to merit 
and worth, whether upon the throne or in the work- 
shop. 

In the name of justice and of human progress, I 
protest against our social habit of stigmatizing 
work of the hand and the vocations that call for it 
as disreputable. I have not the least particle of 
sympathy with that pretentious aristocracy which 
makes the hard hand of necessary and honest toil a 
badge of shame, as though it were a crime to earn 
bread by the sweat of the face, which is God's law ; 
and yet there are many among us who so esteem it, 
to their shame be it spoken. If these persons are 
before me to-night, I will address them now especi- 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 187 

ally. You admit that certain trades in which hard 
work must be done are necessary ; and when 
pressed to the wall, you admit that intrinsically 
they are honorable. In addition, you see men and 
women filling them who have intelligence and virt- 
ue and moral worth. You admit that they acquit 
themselves as nobly in their vocations as the bank- 
er, or merchant, or senator does in his. All this 
you are compelled to admit; and yet, for no other 
reason than that the laborer wields the hammer, or 
drives the plane, or draws the needle, he or she is 
held to be unworth} T of an entree into fashionable 
society. The hard-working mechanic, with all his 
claims for admission on the score of fidelity to his 
calling and general intelligence, is kept out, while 
the man who represents money, however bankrupt 
in virtue, or imbecile in mind, is not only wel- 
comed, but favoringly sought after by the speculat- 
ing fathers and maneuvering mothers of society. I 
know, and you know too, my friends, that our social 
verdict as to worth is often made up in this section by 
the accidents of birth and fortune and wealth, and 
that we even permit costume itself to determine 
our estimate of men and women. We have be- 
come alarmingly dependent on tailors and milliners 
and mantua-makers, and the venders of cosmetics, 
as legitimate means of graduating this worth, and 
are by almost universal suffrage offering premiums 
to dandies and loafers, to Lilliputian bonnets and 
Brobdingnaggian waterfalls. Why, it has come to 
be worth a young man's hopes of a respectable posi- 
tion in society for him to betake himself to hard, 



188 Phil. P. Netty's Sermons. 

laborious hand-work in some necessary and honor- 
able occupation. To do this is to be excluded 
from the so-called first circles of society, while the 
professional loafer, the jeweled idler, the perfumed 
exquisite, who dresses at the expense of his tailor, 
and whose claims to gentility are based simply and 
alone on his exemption from labor — his fashionable 
garb, his soft hand, which compared to his head 
would be granite — while this abortion of humanity 
is allowed his season-ticket into the temple of our 
sham-life of fashion. 

I am no advocate for unconditional social equali- 
ty. I do not plead for that dead-level agrarianism 
in which virtue and vice, knowledge and igno- 
rance, refinement and vulgarity, are made equal. I 
believe in social distinctions, and in their universal 
recognition, but I would have them founded on 
moral and intellectual excellence instead of upon 
mere adventitious differences. What I insist upon 
is that in judging of men and women we should 
rise above mere artificial considerations. The 
legitimate questions to ask in determining a man's 
claims to respectability are, Has he an occupation ? 
Is it a needed occupation? and, Does he faithful- 
ly and intelligently discharge its duties? If his 
life can give an affirmative answer to these ques- 
tions, I am bound to esteem him as a worthy mem- 
ber of society, and as a hero in the great battle of 
humanity. Such a man, however humble his call- 
ing, stands enrolled with God's heroes; with the 
men who are filling the places assigned them by the 
great Task-master ; with the men who are there by 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 189 

Divine appointment, there to do their duty, there 
to toil, to work, to bear humanity onward; there to 
labor while God, the great Producer, gives his bless- 
ing upon their labors. These, I contend, are God's 
heroes, and you may see them everywhere. You 
will find them in the fields of science, calculating 
with Kepler, Newton, and Laplace. You will find 
them in laboratories and in farm-fields, at the desk 
of the merchant, in the offices of exchange, on the 
tripod of the press, at the anvil, by the carpenter's 
bench, in the sick-room, the pulpit, and at the bar; 
and sometimes you will find their worthiest exem- 
plifications in the shop of the pale seamstress, and 
around the midnight taper burning dimly where 
the poor widow, with bent frame and wan features, 
is wearing out her life in efforts to give food and 
raiment and knowledge to her fatherless children. 

it is not in palaces of splendor nor in halls of 
pleasure, where fashion flashes her jewels and 
wealth displays her gauds, where the sound of mu- 
sic and revelry float out upon the dallying winds — 
not there is it you will find the world's working 
heroes; but in the high places of earnest thought, 
and oftener still in the low places of obscurity, 
where the lowly toil and suffer and strive for the 
final victory under the open eye of God; there, 
there they are to be found; and these, when the 
flattered idler, the poor mechanized automaton of 
fashion, and the despicable drone, shall look back 
and shudder at their valueless lives, at their miser- 
ably caricatured existences — these then, though 
they lived in hunger and died in want and under 



190 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

social ban, will find their sweetest, noblest rapture — 
that of remembered usefulness. 

If, then, you are among these great and necessary 
workers, put away that disposition to complain, so 
common to men and yet so unworthy of them and 
their work. No matter where you work so the 
work is needed; no matter whether your calling be 
that of the carpenter, the goldsmith, or at the forge, 
or over the anvil, in the court-room, or by the sick- 
bed, or in the pulpit with the apostle — no matter 
where it is or what it is, I say murmur not, but 
work. O needed worker, what reason hast thou to 
beg for sympathy? to sink discouraged by the way- 
side of toil? to act the part of a whining mendicant 
because society bars you from the pomp and parade, 
the shows and sins of fashion? Thou art nobler 
there in thy honest, sturdy toils for thyself, thy 
children, and for human progress, than those whom 
thou enviest; and so, instead of indulging in un- 
worthy discontent, go forward through duty to re- 
ward. Remember that all noble life is of necessity 
a contest, and instead of complaining harness your- 
self and plunge into the glorious strife. Go into it 
remembering that first comes the battle and then 
the victory; and that each engagement from which 
you come victorious lessens the number yet to be 
fought, and makes greener the laurel with which 
you will at last be crowned. What you need is the 
sublime purpose of going forward in the face of 
every discouragement, the determination that no 
matter what your pursuit is, so it is a necessary 
one you will so wed yourself to it and so discharge 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 191 

its duties as to compel the world to respect both 
you and your calling. I am persuaded that if the 
working-men of the country would determine to 
unite high culture and intelligence with the noble 
callings they have chosen, it would not be long un- 
til every worthy man among them would win his 
way to the highest round in the ladder of social 
position. The fact is, no man with "heart within 
and Godo'erhead," with will and energy and virtue, 
can be kept down in this country. Only briug 
these great factors into the arena of strife, and you 
need fear no opposition. Put these great forces to 
work, and you can recover what some of you may 
have lost; may trample down difficulties which 
blunders in the past may have planted in your path. 
That past may be strewn with the wrecks of im- 
providence and dissipation, and the biting curs of 
society may say that you never can redeem it, that 
the' mountain is too ponderous for you to remove 
it; yet in the name of the great God who loves the 
right and who will crown it with victory, I tell you 
to-night that b} T will, by purpose, by unfaltering 
energy you can hurl it from your path and stand at 
last with the victor's palm in your hand and the 
conqueror's shout upon your lips. 

Look at the thousands who have gone up from 
places of toil to the highest places of eminence and 
power, and determine that what others have done you 
too can and will do. Look up, I say, and let their 
example inspire you with confidence. JSTo towering 
crag half-way to heaven was their starting place. 
They started from poverty and amid toil. It was 



192 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

in humble places, in places of obscurity, in callings 

that abounded with hard hand-work; it was there 

they fledged pinions that have borne them to the 

sun. O let the lofty psalmody rolling out from the 

great deeds of such as these make you believing 

and persevering, and determined upon success. 

That, young gentlemen, is what you need — high 

purpose and sublime, unfaltering determination 

that God helping you the world shall feel your 

power, and feel it for good, You need a grand 

resolution like that by which the noble Ingomar 

was upheld, when exalted by love into a demigod 

he exclaimed: T ,,..*,, ,, 

I could lift the world 

From off its solid center, drink the ocean 

Dry, and then tear down the stars of heaven ; 

All that is possible — ay, or impossible — 

I '11 do for bliss like this ! 

that I could inspire you with faith in your suc- 
cess; with purpose and will and determination to 
succeed ! O that I could send a summons to my 
young countrymen everywhere that would turn 
their workshops, their farm-houses, their counting- 
rooms and offices, into places of study during their 
hours of leisure! that I could burn into your 
souls who hear me to-night an undying purpose to 
make men of yourselves! — a determination to win 
and wear the crown of usefulness! to conquer all 
difficulties, and to enter the temple of immortality! 
What are the difficulties from which you shrink 
back dismayed and cowering? What are they but 
phantoms which a noble ambition may put to flight? 
think of your endowments of thought, of reason, 



Diversity and Contentment in Labor. 193 

of intelligence, and of will — of the conquering might 
which these give to the soul; and then resolve that 
as others fought and conquered you too will fight and 
conquer, and prove yourselves worthy to stand near 
the great white throne and among the band of he- 
roes who in dust and toil, who amid defamation 
and wrong, and some of them at the cost of life it- 
self, learned the pass-word to the skies. There they 
stand to-night with the valiant of God's kingdom, 
and at his right-hand. They trod the earth in toil, 
yet with stately steps, champions for God and mar- 
tyrs to truth; and rolling centuries have not extin- 
guished the light left burning in their footsteps. 
"Onward they passed," as Longfellow has said of 
others, "like those hoary elders seen in the sublime 
vision of an earthly paradise, attendant angels bear- 
ing golden lamps before them, while above and be- 
hind the air teemed with colors as from the trail of 
pencils." 

weary workers, if such be here to-night; 
toilers in humble places, beside the couch of pain, 
watching all through the night and until your faces 
grow wan and pale as the morning light comes 
through the parted blinds to find you still at work; 
O tired ones, who toil and see no fruit, who 
watch and fight and pray, and yet seem far from 
the victory — who keep working, working, forever 
working, and yet are forever poor ; and ye who go 
on night after night sewing and stitching until loug 
after the midnight chime rings out upon the still 
air, but whose hard labors bring but a scant sup- 
ply of food and clothing to your little babes; O 
13 



194 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

workers, brothers and sisters in this fellowship 
of toil, the time of rest is corning ! In heaven — yes, 
in heaven — we shall find time to rest, and there we 
may all rest, and rest forever. 

No sickness there, 
No weary wasting of the frame away, 
No dread of summer's bright and fervid ray. 

No hidden grief, 
No wild and cheerless vision of despair, 
No vain petition for a swift relief, 
No tearful eyes, no broken hearts are there. 

Care has no home 
Within that realm of ceaseless prayer and song ; 
Its tossing billows break and melt in foam 
Far from the mansions of the spirit-throng 

The storm's black wing 
Is never spread athwart celestial skies, 
Its wailings blend not with the voice of spring 
As some too tender floweret fades and dies. 

No parted friends 
O'er mournful recollections have to weep, 
No bed of death enduring love attends, 
To watch the coming of a pulseless sleep. 

Let us depart, 
If home like this awaits the weary soul! 
Look up, then, stricken one ! — thy wounded heart 
Shall bleed no more, nor tears of sorrow roll. 

With faith our guide, 
White-robed and innocent, to tread the way, 
Why fear to plunge in Jordan's rolling tide, 
And find the haven of eternal day? 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 



" When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the 
moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man, 
that thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that thou 
visitest him ? For thou hast made him a little lower than 
the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. 
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy 
hands; thou hast put all things under his feet." Psalm viii. 
3-6. 

WHILE the speculative systems of unbelief 
have differed widely iu some respects, they 
have been generally found united in their underval- 
uation of human nature. Man, they hold, is but an 
atom in a universe of unsummed, untraveled mag- 
nitude — an ephemeron amid the uncreated ages — a 
mist lost in the surrounding masses, and therefore 
beneath the notice of Him who created the heavens 
and the earth. They stand out beneath the heavens 
with their suns and moons and stars, those magnifi- 
cent structures which the Almighty Architect has 
built, and as they contemplate their number, their 
maguitude, and their glory, in contrast with man — 
the atom, the ephemeron, and the unit — they persuade 
themselves that for him to claim that the Almighty 
Builder and Sovereign of all this material grandeur 
can be concerned about so insignificant a creature 



196 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

as man is the very height of presumptuous con- 
ceit. 

Now, the material philosophy that pronounces 
this verdict bases it on a material estimate of man, 
which way of estimating him is as opposed to reason 
as it is against revelation. Reason cannot be just to 
herself and measure man by the mere materiality 
of his being. To be true to herself she must take 
his dimensions as a rational, intelligent, immortal 
being, and award him position and value not as 
so many pounds of curiously wrought and won- 
derfully combined matter, but as the nearest intel- 
lectual and moral imitation of the Creator to be 
found in all the works of God. This is the view 
presented of him in revelation. The Word of God 
in this and other things stands in illustrious and 
cheering contrast to the chilling speculations of in- 
fidel philosophy. 

The psalmist seems at first to have been baffled 
in his estimate of man when he looked at him in 
his physical constitution and in contrast with the 
amplitude and magnificence of the material crea- 
tion: "When I consider thy heavens, the work of 
thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou 
hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful 
of him ? and the son of man, that thou visitest him ?" 
But when he turns from this material view, his con- 
ceptions enlarge, and we find him in the transition 
of a single sentence contemplating him as some- 
thing exalted, glorious, and almost angelic: " Thou 
hast made him a little lower than the angels, and 
hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 197 

madest him to have dominion over the work of thy 
hands; thou hast put all things under his feet." 
In this outburst he is assigned the first place in the 
scale of creation, is represented as occupying a 
grade in the Divine regard only less than the an- 
gels themselves, and as having in fact been ap- 
pointed to a dominion in this world corresponding 
to the dominion which the Sovereign God main- 
tains over all worlds. Now, if this be his exalted 
position in the order of creation, it furnishes an 
overwhelming answer to that unbelief that would 
exclude him from God's watchful care on the 
ground of his alleged insignificance, and shows 
why the Almighty should be momentarily mindful 
of him, which is the great thought so necessary to 
our comfort in this changing life. 

Let us now, in the spirit of devout supplication 
for light upon this precious truth of revelation, pass 
in solemn review before us man's wonderful constitu- 
tion and his high rank in the scale of creation, and 
see if these do not, even in the estimation of reason, 
entitle him to the watchful care of the Sovereign 
God. 

And first now, as to his constitution, What is 
man? This constitution is complex, made up of 
body and mind and soul. Look at his body, and 
see how fearfully and wonderfully he is made. Be- 
hold how part answers to part, how each is adapted 
to the other, how admirably the whole is adjust- 
ed to the indwelling soul and for the relations 
of that soul to the external universe. Ascend 
from the body to the mind, the affections, and the 



198 Phil P. Neelys Sermons. 

will, and the wonder of his complex organization 
increases. He alone of all the animate creation has 
the power of thought, of reason, of understanding. 
By his intellectual endowments he can trace the re- 
lations of things; can follow effects back to causes; 
can calculate with some degree of precision the 
future by data gathered from the past; can classify 
and distribute a world and even a universe of ob- 
jects and events ; can reproduce in his own mind 
parts of the great plan of the Infinite Mind itself; 
can ascend the pyramid of creation, whose head 
towers away into the invisible, and behold there the 
Creator enthroned on the summit. He alone, of all 
the life with which the visible universe teems, is 
capable of surveying the whole with thought and 
reflection, of ascribing it to one great First Cause. 
To him only belongs that faculty by which all that 
occurs leaves an ineffaceable image on the mind, 
by which all the experiences of life and the events 
of Providence leave their imprint on the tablet of 
the heart, and by which at every step through life 
the soul is being filled with recollections and impres- 
sions that will abide with it forever and become 
subjects for remorse or for gratitude throughout 
eternity. To him alone has been given the pow- 
er of imagination — that power which enables him 
without quitting the globe he inhabits to pass 
the outermost limits of creation, to press into the 
invisible worlds, to enter with unsandaled feet the 
"heaven of heavens," and lose himself in the 
splendors that break from the eternal throne. He 
is the only being susceptible of emotions of pity, 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 199 

compassion, benevolence, and that grandest of all 
capabilities, the power to love. His capacity in 
this respect verges on the infinite ; for after you 
have supplied it with all that this world can offer 
for its gratification, he still sighs for more, for an 
excellence that is infinite. After taking all created 
excellence to his heart and lavishing his affections 
on it, he still has affection to spare — still has ca- 
pacities unoccupied, still has boundless love un- 
employed ; and the loftiest height of created excel- 
lence only furnishes him with a point from which 
to soar away in quest of Him who challenges all the 
love of which he is capable. He is the only being 
too that can be influenced by motives, and that 
has the faculty of will. While his appetites 
stoop to gather up their objects from the dust, a 
sense of duty and the sovereign power of will 
can bear him away in homage to the throne of the 
invisible. 

Although he is a child of earth, the same motive 
can impel him to action which at the same mo- 
ment isimpelliugan archangel as he speeds his way 
on some high and heavenly mission. As a creature 
capable of moral government, he is made not only 
to find happiness in obeying the very laws to 
which God himself conforms, but is capable of 
sympathy with the divine character, of reflecting 
the divine excellence, and of even aspiring to live 
for the very same end as that for which God him- 
self lives and reigns — the manifestation of the di- 
vine glory. 

These are some of his endowments; and when 



200 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

you reflect that these are all stamped with immor- 
tality, you cannot help feeling that this being, so 
royally dowered and so deathless, must be more to 
the Creator than a whole universe of unthinking, 
unchoosing, and unloving matter. That universe 
knows not its origin; has no power to calculate its 
dimensions; is without thought, feeling, and affec- 
tion. Man has all these, and is therefore greater 
than the universe. The suu, high fixed as it is on 
its throne of fire; the moon and stars, receiving 
and scattering abroad as the}- do the splendors of 
the bright day god, whose radiance kindles upon 
them the unutterable glory of the night — these 
august witnesses to the majesty of the Creator see 
not their own light, feel not their own heat, do not 
know even of their own existence. These all too 
are to pass away, leaving the vast fields of immen- 
sity vacant or filled Avith wrecks of matter and frag- 
ments of demolished worlds; yet when these are 
gone man will only have entered upon the infancy 
of an existence which is to run parallel with the 
existence of God. This of itself places him high 
above all material grandeur and amplitude and 
value; high above God's sweeping sky, with its 
moon and stars; high above a universe of central 
suns and far-reaching systems of dumb, unintelli- 
gent matter. 

O if but one of the human race had been en- 
dowed with this immortality, that one would have 
outmeasured in dignity and worth the heavens 
and the earth; that one would have been the won- 
der and admiration of angels, and would have en- 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 201 

listed more of God's love and care than the whole 
material universe. If but one had been thus dow- 
ered by the Father, and all others of our race had 
been doomed to annihilation, how the ages would 
have crowded to that one with their homage! how 
would all earthly crowns be eclipsed and all earthly 
distinctions forgotten in his presence ! And yet this 
inheritance of immortality belongs to all; and 
more than this, all have this immortality with con- 
stant progression in excellence and happiness — the 
mind ever augmenting its stores of happiness and 
enlarging only to augment them more; ever as- 
cending the loftiest throne it can behold, only to 
see others loftier still rising before it and inviting 
it onward ; and this throughout an infinity of dura- 
tion which will be to the good an eternity of enjoy- 
ment. 

Is it a matter of astonishment now that a being 
so wonderfully endowed should be esteemed as next 
to the angels, and that to him should have been 
committed a sovereignty over nature? Do you 
wonder now that the psalmist should say, while 
contemplating him in these respects, "Thou mad- 
est him to have dominion over the works of thy 
hands; thou hast put all things under his feet?" 

So far now I have spoken of man's physical, in- 
tellectual, and moral constitution, and of the claims 
which these constituents of his being present for 
the Divine regard. I propose now to take another 
step, and to call your attention to the most valuable 
element in his wonderful constitution, which is his 
spirituality, or the capability he has as a spirit of 



202 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

being permeated and inspired by the Almighty 
Spirit; and this, I think, is his highest distinction 
in the scale of intelligence, and makes him more 
akin to God and of more worth in God's esteem 
than all else. What he can do and what he does 
do by virtue of his intelligence shows that he is 
like God; but his permeableness, or inspirableness, 
shows a capacity for receiving God which is great- 
er than Godlikeness. The one demonstrates his 
greatness, the other his divineness. By the one 
he creates and uses language; makes record of the 
past; enacts laws; builds institutions; climbs the 
heavens — searches out their times and their orbits; 
bridges the sea by his inventions; commands the 
lightnings to think his thoughts, and do his er- 
rands to the ends of the world. By the other he is 
penetrated and lighted up from within by the mind 
of God; has an understanding of things unseen by 
the inspiration of the Almighty; in a word, is a 
spirit, having an inward consciousness of God, and 
is a being irradiated and filled with the divine full- 
ness. ' 

Strictly speaking, this inspirableness is a distinct 
element from what has been called man's moral nat- 
ure, and is higher than the moral, just as the moral 
is higher than the animal. I want, if I can, to lead 
you to apprehend this distinction. To be a moral be- 
ing is to have a sense of duty and a power of choice 
which support and justify responsibility. It is that 
in us which recognizes the supremacy of moral 
ideas, or abstract notions, and acknowledges their 
binding force as laws or principles. Animals, for 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 203 

example, have a certain power of intelligence, but 
they have no sense of duty or law, and are there- 
fore irresponsible. They have no moral nature. 
Now, if you advance man from an animal to a moral 
being, and yet deny to him the spiritual element of 
his constitution, you leave him just as far separated 
from God as is the animal. And even where he has 
this spiritual element, but refuses to acknowledge 
and exercise, it he is only an animal with a mor- 
al nature which is wholly destitute of God. An 
atheist, for example, can have moral ideas, and act- 
ing on the plane of the world as a member of soci- 
ety he can feel and can personally honor the obli- 
gations of society, and yet be as empty of God as 
the stone in your streets. But to be a spirit, a God- 
receiving spirit, is to be practically related to a God 
in us. It is to be capable not only of duty, or of 
sentiments of duty, but of actually receiving God, 
of actually knowing him, and of being actually 
permeated, filled, ennobled, and glorified by his in- 
finite Spirit. It is right here that humanity culmi- 
nates and unveils the summit on which floats the 
flag of its highest possible dignity. It is in the fact 
that man by his high constitution is a spirit, a be- 
ing open to the visitation and indwelling power of 
God. In this sense he is equal to the angels them- 
selves, for even angelic nature cannot go higher 
than this. Not even the crowned archangels can 
excel in order a soul so configured to God as to be 
inspirable by him, able to receive his impulse, able 
to fall into his movement, able to rest in his ends, 
and to be finally perfected in the eternity of his 



204 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

joys. Now, to what a height of almost divinity does 
this view of man elevate him ! Who does not trem- 
ble in awe of himself at the thought that in accord- 
ance with his spiritual constitution the Eternal Spirit 
of God is continually coursing through the secret 
cells and chambers of his feeling, turning him 
about in his motions and calling back his wild af- 
fections to a common center with his own ? 

This inspirableness, my brethren, is the prepared 
groundwork for man's regeneration, for his sancti- 
fication, and for his final glorification in heaven. 
For him to be born of the Spirit is simply for him 
to know God as revealed in his inmost life by 
a knowledge that is immediate. This is the real 
significance of regeneration. It is not that a man 
is set in a new relation to abstract laws and tests 
and obligations; but it is that he is brought back 
into his true normal relation to the Eternal Spirit of 
God, and begins to live as he was intended to live — 
an inspired life: a life led by the Spirit, dwelt in 
by the Spirit, permeated, filled, and sanctified by 
the Spirit. A man thus inspired of God awakes to 
a consciousness of his sovereignty over all things 
around him ; and more than all, he is sovereign 
over himself through the might of the indwelling 
Spirit. He governs himself the more sublimely 
and, as it were, imperially because he feels that he 
is crowned as a king by the inspiration he feels. 
He subdues the body, tramples down pain and 
scorn, rides over death, and plants himself as a 
conqueror side by side with his Master. breth- 
ren, here, right here in this spiritual element of our 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 205 

constitution, is our greatest value in the sight of 
God, as well as the grandest possibilities of our nat- 
ure. It consists in the fact that we are the only 
part in God's order of creation that can receive him 
in this sense of inspiration. Nature may be above 
us in magnitude, but not in a receptivity for God. 
The stars may outshine us, the mountains may be 
grander and the ocean sublimer as vast materialities, 
but they are not spirit, and are therefore notinspira- 
ble. God, by his omnipotence, may act upon them. 
He can penetrate all central fires and dissolve or 
annihilate every most secret atom of the worlds, 
he can plant his forge in chaos and mold planets 
and crowd immensity with suns and systems, but 
he cannot inspire them. Nothing created can re- 
ceive him in this respect unless it is constitution- 
ally related to him in terms that permit correspond- 
ence. To receive him there must be intelligence 
offered to his intelligence, sentiments to his senti- 
ments, reason to his reason, will to his will — in a 
word, there must be spirit opening to his Spirit; 
and these great elements of spirituality belong only 
to man. They separate him from and set him above 
all other creatures, and show him to be scarcely 
less different from them than God is himself. 
When I compare him, then, in this respect to the 
moon and stars which God has ordained, they all 
pale into insignificance before him as a spirit capa- 
ble of receiving God. The obedient worlds of 
heaven have no such power. They can follow the 
Divine will, and fill immensity with their stupen- 
dous frame of order, yet they have nothing in their 



206 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

substance correspondent with God as a Spirit, and 
cannot do what the humblest soul on earth can do, 
receive a direct and conscious communication of 
God. They may be shaken, melted, exploded, and 
even be annihilated by his will, but they are neither 
vast enough in size nor high enough in quality to 
gather into their bosoms his inspiration. 

Look back at the history of your race, and behold 
how in different ages this inspirable element in 
men has flamed out in characters called of God to 
show it forth in its largest manifestations. Behold 
it in an Enoch, whose affinities were so changed by 
it that the earth could hold him down no longer; 
in an Elijah, whose chariot was borne by it to heav- 
en as hurrying winds drive the cloud before them ; 
in a Moses, as he comes from Horeb, the liberator, 
leader, and lawgiver of Israel ; in a Peter, a Paul, a 
John, a Luther, a Wesley, and thousands more, 
who, under this inspiration, went forth to conquer 
the world to Christ. These grand, God-partaking 
natures have stood out in every age as representa- 
tives of the inspirableness of human nature. His- 
tory represents them as responding from height to 
height to one another as the centuries swept on, as 
bonfires, carrying this great truth onward from 
range to range throughout the ages. They are as 
watch-fires flaming along the past, telling of the 
possibilities of our nature, and there they will con- 
tinue to burn while the sunset lingers and until the 
sunrise breaks. They tell us how great man is. 
They tell you how great }'ou may become — that it 
is possible for the humblest of you to be filled 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 207 

with the sublime personality of God, and forever 
exalted by his inspirations; forever moving in the 
divine movement, forever rested on the divine cen- 
ter, and forever blessed in the divine beatitude. 

what is the world's madness and misery, its 
revenges and hates and cruelties, its crazed re- 
ligions, its bloody wars, its enkindled passions; 
its wild, frenzied race for happiness, its longings 
and aspirations and disappointments, its cries of 
agony and wails of despair — what is all this mixture 
of the angel and the demon as seen in the history 
of our race, and as felt in some of your bosoms, but 
the retributions which this inspirable element takes 
on those that permit it, showing that mistreat it as 
men may it still lives, and will assert its defrauded 
rights and strive to reclaim its lost glories ? And 
then think of the hell which its neglect or misuse 
kindles — the hell disclosed in the gospel, the hell 
whose supreme of misery will be that God is ab- 
sent. That hell is represented as " outer dark- 
ness," because it is that night of the mind which 
overtakes the soul when it strays from God and his 
light; think, I say, that if the very perfection of 
misery and the fiercest agony of hell are to come to 
the soul simply because of its severance from God, 
how great must be the soul's capacity for God, and 
how near akin this makes us to God ! O to be eter- 
nally severed from his inspirations is enough, as we 
are constituted, to complete our wretchedness ! No 
matter whether that severance extinguish our ca- 
pacity of inspiration or leave it gasping, so to 
speak, after the inspiring breath of God forever 



208 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

shut away — no matter, I say, which, the severance 
itself will be the perfection of misery. The one 
would be the misery of deformity and weakness, 
the other of exile and want. The one would be 
that of a soul so halved in its capacity as to leave 
the other half unregulated and torn by disorders 
which it has no higher nature left to subordinate 
and quell; the other would be that of a soul in full 
capacity torn by disorders, hopeless of all good, and 
yet struggling with immortal want beside. 

that I could make you see in all this not only 
an argument for man's greatness, but what would 
be still better, a motive for you to struggle to be 
good ! that you would recognize in these ele- 
ments of your grand nature not only a reason why 
God should care for you — should care for you more 
than he cares for the material universe — but a rea- 
son, a commanding reason, why you should return 
his unremitting providence over you with a service 
born in gratitude and made willing and obedient 
by love ! 

You came from his hand not only with the rich- 
est endowments of mind, but constituted so as to be 
divinely inhabited. It is the highest glory of your 
being that you were made to live in eternal inspi- 
ration, for you are a spirit, and have been put in 
correspondence with God. He has " crowned you 
with glory and honor," and given you a certain 
power of sovereignty. You have only to open your 
whole nature to him, to offer yourselves to him in 
the spirit of contrition and of real, unquestioning 
faith, and the light will not more certainly break 



The Greatness and Value of Man. 209 

into the sky and fill the horizon with day when the 
morning sun rises than he will flood your soul with 
peace and joy and love. 

O that I could lead you to understand how great 
a being you are, and how great a height those have 
attained to who are established everlastingly in the 
inspired state ! It has made them kings and priests 
unto God. They have become the kinsmen of an- 
gels, the companions of seraphim — bright and 
strong and free, because the Eternal Spirit leads 
them and shines forever in glorious evidence 
through them. They are princes now at God's 
right-hand. There they walk, in their greatness 
and might and majesty, in the range of divinity. 
you cannot but see, as you contemplate them in 
their glorious beauty and in the royal confidence of 
their eternity, how much it signifies that they were 
endowed with a spirit capable of God and of the 
abiding grace of his presence. As you behold 
them there in the glory of their resurrection, visi- 
bly perfected and ennobled by the divine inhabita- 
tion, surrounded with holy myriads and gloriously 
transfigured by the light of God falling upon them 
from his radiant throne — as you see them there, re- 
joicing in a knowledge and bathed in a holiness 
and basking in a love only less than the knowledge 
and holiness and love of the Father himself, learn 
what a distinction it is that you are a man and uo f 
a world. Go forward to the age when the heaveni 
shall be no more, when the universe will be in 
ruins; when the last orb that wheels in yon blazing 
sky will have been laid away in the charnel-house 
14 



210 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

of departed worlds, and as you behold man surviv- 
ing all and admitted either to an eternal partner- 
ship with God or to an everlasting fellowship with 
devils, learn your value, and determine to live wor- 
thy of it. 



The Philosophy of Life. 



" So teach us to number our days that we may apply our 
hearts unto wisdom." Psalm xc. 12. 

THESE annual reunions, on occasions of academ- 
ic celebration, are not without a deep signif- 
icance, my friends. They tell us that the cause of 
education has an earnest lodgment in the hearts of 
the people, that a profound interest is being felt 
for the youth of our country, and that parents and 
guardians are eager to witness the results of the 
months of toil that precede the#e annual holidays. 
Their presence on these occasions not only gives 
encouragement to the young but gladness and 
freshness to their own world-weary spirits. We, 
who are older, in this way rekindle the wasting 
fires of our own youth-time. We revive the hopes 
that stirred our bosoms when, long years ago, we 
too stood on the margin of life's battle-field and 
yearned to go forth into the contest. 

As the traveler in the fierce noon-time of a sum- 
mer day recalls some sunny slope in the tangled 
wildwood through which he passed in the cool, 
bright morning, so do we amid these glad sur- 
roundings remember the days when we were 
young — a memory all the more beautiful too when 



212 Phil. P. Ncelys Sermons. 

contrasted with the stern duties, the hand-to-hand 
conflicts with care and anxiety, in which we have 
since had to engage. 

Who of us here to-day that takes in these smiling 
faces, these unclouded brows, these beaming eyes, 
these innocent bosoms which, like the undulations 
of the sea, are glowing with warm, impassioned 
hopes of the future — who of us that witnesses a 
spectacle like this but lives over a similar hour in 
his own history, and recalls with a sigh, and per- 
haps a tear, the bright visions which then beckoned 
him on? What though these may have proved an 
illusion, a dream long since perished, a bubble that 
has parted in the wave of later years ? They were 
beautiful to us then, and their very memory is beau- 
tiful now ; for they were born at a period when the 
canker was not in our hearts, nor the earth-stain on 
our wings. The hot desert sun had not then glared 
down on our heads, nor had the mountain crags 
bled our feet to soreness. We had not then learned 
that lesson so bitter to the young, the lesson of 
doubt and distrust. We were better then than 
now, for the journey was all before us, and we were 
loving and trustful, hopeful and happy. That pe- 
riod, my friends, is gone; yet we cannot efface its 
beauty nor bury its memories. They rise before 
some of you on this bright summer morning, and 
for the moment seem real. Ah, happy for us if we 
could stay their flight and live forever young and 
confiding ! But as this cannot be, let us, now that 
we are here to look upon our children, consecrate 
the hour to their instruction and profit. 



The Philosophy of Life. 213 

We desire, my young friends, to offer you some 
thoughts which if earnestly pondered may make 
you wiser and better and happier ; some counsel 
which, while it may not mar the brightness of your 
commencement festivities, will, if thoughtfully re- 
ceived, aid you in placing a proper value on time, 
a high estimate on life — counsel which we trust 
will give you a deeper insight into its nature, a 
loftier conception of its aims, of their grandeur 
and nobleness, and that will constrain you to go 
from this temple with the prayer of the psalmist 
abiding in your hearts and consecrating your lips: 
" So teach us to number our days that we may ap- 
ply our hearts unto wisdom." 

The great secret of human happiness, my friends, 
is to live right ; and to do this we must understand 
the nature of life — not merely our physical existence, 
but our mental and moral being, comprehending the 
powers with which we have been endowed, our re- 
sponsibility to Him who has thus nobly endowed 
us, our manifold relations to Him and to our race, 
the duties we owe to Him and them, and the best 
means of preparation for meeting these responsibil- 
ities and performing these duties. Now, in order 
to bring these several points clearly before you, we 
would have you feel in the outset that life is a 
solemn reality. It is a stupendous fact that you 
exist, that you — a being that can feel and think, 
that can love and reason, can remember and fore- 
cast, can plan and calculate, can choose and refuse, 
can do or not do, according to the decisions of a self- 
determining principle within you — are here, here by 



214 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

the ordination of God, here surrounded by manifold 
evidences that there is a great purpose too in your 
wonderful being. It is a fact too that comes 
home to you in all the attractions of mystery, for 
your entrance upon this fearful being was one of 
mystery ; your stay here is amid manifold mysteries, 
and when you go hence, as all must, it will be by 
a path over which there will hang a cloud of deep 
and dark and inscrutable mystery. Of the life be- 
yond that valley we may not now speak, as it is with 
existence here, as preparatory to what is beyond, 
that we are now concerned. Another view of life is 
that you exist here as a person. As such you have 
an individual responsibility, a personal part to per- 
form which none other in all the universe can do 
but yourself — a work which will come back to you 
in the life beyond in blessings or curses, just as 
you may do good or evil in the life that now is. 
All of us are disposed to merge our individuality 
in the multitude, to sink the person in the mass, 
to undervalue ourselves as to the duties required, 
and by connecting ourselves with others fence off 
the feeling of personal responsibility so necessary 
as a stimulus to the performance of duty. We are 
prone to say, as we look around and see how much 
ought to be done by somebod} 7 , "Others are more 
competent — their circumstances are more favorable 
to doing than ours; " and we often wonder why they 
are not more active, persuading ourselves that could 
we occupy their places our course would be quite 
different from theirs. In all this we are forgetting 
the personality of our being, are hiding ourselves 



The Philosophy of Life. 215 

away in the great hive of humanity, waiting for 
others to do what should be occupying our own 
time and engrossing our energies. Therefore re- 
member that in one sense you are living alone; 
that God has given you a distinct personality, with 
responsibilities that pertain to you as an individu- 
al; that no matter how many others live, they do 
not absolve you from these individual responsibili- 
ties; that in this sense you are to be the architect 
of your own fortunes — individual builders on these 
walls of time ; and that when the Master-builder 
comes to inspect the work, each workman must 
stand condemned or approved according to the 
evil or good which he may have done. 

Life is associational as well as personal. By 
this we mean that every individual life is linked 
with all other lives, and that the present has insep- 
arable connection with the past and future. As 
each hour of the day maintains a relation with the 
hours that go before and the hours that come after 
it, so does each individual life bear a necessary re- 
lation both to the lives that have been and the 
lives that are to be. Therefore existence is segre- 
gate and aggregate, individual and social. The 
life that we are now living is not only your life and 
my life, and the life of all living, but it belongs by 
association to all who have lived and to all who 
may yet live, being but an integral of the great 
life-circle whereof all have part. What incalcu- 
lable worth does this thought give to the pres- 
ent, for each segregate portion of the great ag- 
gregate, however minute that portion is, has an 



216 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons, 

importance in proportion to its relation to the 
whole, and cannot be foolishly squandered without 
guilt. Each of these minute portions of time in- 
volves consequences connected mediately or imme- 
diately with all foregone ages and with the cycles 
yet to follow, and is to continue its effects through 
an infinitely progressive being. Then, while it 
is true that what you do is a personal work, for 
which you are personally responsible, it is no less 
true that it is associated by great connectional laws 
with all your race and with the silent eternities 
both of the past and future. But the idea that we 
would present with prominence in connection with 
this associational phase of life is that it connects 
you in the present with every living man and wom- 
an on the globe and lays on you an obligation to 
labor for their good. To this labor you are bound 
by the constitution of your life, by your mutual 
dependence one on another, and by all your hopes 
for the progress and salvation of your race. This 
great lesson the world, even the Christian world, 
has not yet learned. On every hand we see men 
living for self, for personal aggrandizement, when 
by this law of their being, as enacted by God, they 
should be living for others. We see them, in 
neglect of this, living in states of social, religious, 
and national disintegration. They have their own 
families, their own religious sects, their own form 
of government. They seem to say, " What to us are 
other families, other communions, and other forms 
of government? " 

No life, my friends, was ever grand that did not 



The Philosophy of Life. 217 

go out of itself. The grandest life ever recorded — 
that of Jesus — was one of the completest self-forget- 
fulness and of the amplest benevolence. It is true 
he lived as a human — having sensation, conflict, and 
temptation just as we all have, and having to sub- 
mit to struggle and discipline as all must — yet how 
majestically he moved among men, exemplifying 
every day of his life that self-abnegation that must 
enter into every noble life ! None were too poor 
for him to mingle with, none so obscure as to be 
beyond his help, none fallen so low as to have no 
claim on his compassion. Wherever there was 
poverty or sin or suffering, thither he turned his 
footsteps, and there would he abide until his hand 
had healed the sickness and his words comforted 
the sufferer, His was a model life — a life of sacri- 
fice, of devotion to others, of well-doing — a life 
the grandeur of which has been speaking for nearly 
two thousand years. Then, go out from yourselves 
and toil for others, if you would be like your great 
Exemplar. Like him, be a benefaction to your race. 
Be at work, always at work, for God and humanity. 
Be instructed by these lessons which all nature is 
ever teaching — lessons of sympathy, of kindness, 
and of love. Let the lily on the mountain-side, 
and the rose hanging on its frail stem in your 
garden-walk — there to add to your happiness — 
teach you ! Let the mountain and the oak, the 
deep sea and the silent stars, the laughing rill 
and the marching world, let nature with all her 
ten thousand harmonies, sing to you the psalm of 
duty; and as you read written on earth and sky 



218 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

that "nothing has a right to live to itself," go 
forth to duty and toil — expecting your reward not 
here, but there. 

Having offered these desultory thoughts on the 
nature of life, we proceed, in the second place, to 
inquire into some of the ends contemplated in its 
bestowal. We are too prone to regard life not so 
much according to its nature and the purposes for 
which it was given as our satisfaction or dissatis- 
faction with it. When it goes on without interrup- 
tion ; when the face of fortune beams smilingly 
upon us, and our business prospers ; when hope 
ripens daily into fruition, and the circle of our joys 
is unbroken ; when our homes escape sickness, and 
the dear ones there wear smiles of peace and con^ 
tentment — then we find it easy to call life good; 
then we are happy, and can say, "How beautiful is 
life!" 

But now, let us change the picture. Let the 
sunshine depart and the dun clouds begin to lower; 
let disappointment in business overtake us; let 
domestic troubles gather darkly around us; let 
sickness come to our dwellings ; let death sit down 
b} 7 our firesides, laying low the arm of the husband, 
stilling the heart of the wife, or sealing the eyes of 
our little lambs — ah ! let the grave close over ob- 
jects like these, hiding from us the faces we had 
long loved to gaze upon and hushing into silence 
lips which through life had opened only to bless us — 
let us, when we have laid these away in their graves, 
return to our desolate homes to behold there their 
images rising up with the sight of the garments 






The Philosophy of Life. 219 

they wore, the seats they once occupied, the music 
of songs they sung, and of words they were accus- 
tomed to utter; let the picture be thus changed, 
and how different our views of life, and how the 
poor orphaned, broken spirit longs to wander away 
and rest in the bosom of God ! 

Now, is this because life of itself is evil ? No, no, 
my friends; for checkered as it sometimes is, and 
fraught with heart-aches, as may be our journey 
here, life is sacred — for it is the gift of our Father 
in heaven, and is designed for our ultimate good. 
It is a school in which we are to be trained for a 
nobler existence. Now, in this earthly school the 
modes by which the mind and heart are to receive 
their training, by which the former is to be illumi- 
nated and made reverent, believing, and adoring, 
and by which the latter is to be cleansed from evil 
and purified from passion, and exalted to commun- 
ion with the Father aud fellowship with his Son — 
these modes, we say, are various, and unless we 
understand well the end of all these blended joys 
and sorrows, the end of these duties and struggles, 
we will often weep when we ought to smile, and 
will sometimes despair when we have good reason 
to hope on in comforting assurance of a brighter 
dawn to-morrow. Then, we invoke your attention, 
and especially the young, while we speak of some 
of the purposes for which life is given. 

To speak generically, life has been given for pur- 
poses of discipline, and is to be made up of intense 
struggles, earnest endeavors, and severe contests. 
In this discipline there are employed two distinct 



220 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

instrumentalities which we would have you all un- 
derstand and remember. The first is made up of 
the circumstances thrown around us in early life, 
such as our parentage, our associations, the schools 
we are sent to, the churches we attend, the books 
we read, and the amusements we share. These, in 
the main, have to be provided by parents and 
guardians, and should be selected judiciously and 
with earnest prayer to God for direction. And yet, 
how little attention is bestowed here by those to 
whom has been committed the custody of young 
immortality ! What an awful account will Chris- 
tian parents have to render in the final day for their 
shameful neglect at this point ! They labor and 
sacrifice that their children may have wealth and 
position, that they may shine in the salons of fash- 
ion, and be admired for a beauty that is ephem- 
eral ; they exhaust their skill in matrimonial diplo- 
macy, that they may maneuver their children into 
matches that are held to be commercially good, 
and yet give no time, no prayer, no effort to that 
training on which character here is to rest, and on 
which the hope of heaven in a measure depends. 
We need an awakening, a reformation on this sub- 
ject in the Church of God — in our Church, once so 
careful on this point, but now so neglectful. We 
educate our children more for society than for 
the Church, more for the world than for God, 
and it is not astonishing that so many of them 
learn to despise the faith of their fathers amid 
the gayety and worldliness for which we train 
them. If you value the immortality of your chil- 



The Philosophy of Life. 221 

dren, and would save their souls, look well to this 
matter. 

A second instrumentality in this discipline re- 
fers to a later period in life — the period of manhood 
and womanhood — and is that exercised by the in- 
dividual in the way of will, self-culture, self-denial, 
etc. We regard this instrumentality as the propel- 
ling force in intellectual, moral, and spiritual culture, 
and as deserving your special attention. And now, 
that you may get our meaning clearly, we will con- 
sider these severally and separately. 

1. The first kind of discipline, then, to which we 
direct your attention is that of the mind. We are 
so constituted as to be largely dependent on intel- 
lectual culture for happiness. It is also essential 
to enlarged influence. It is in the possession of 
reason and the power to discriminate between 
truth and error, between good and evil, that 
man is distinguished from inferior animals ; and 
when this faculty is permitted to grow up without 
culture, he is but a remove from the brutes around 
him. He then becomes the subject of instinct and 
the slave of passion, and is of but little use to him- 
self or the world. Thought, in the true meaning of 
that word, is neither voluntary nor spontaneous. 
It is the result of discipline, the product of hard 
labor. To think is to toil. It is first to put the 
brain to work, and then to "let memory observe 
and register the result." Now, we do not deny 
that our mental perceptions are often spontaneous, 
and that the impressions taken therefrom through 
the consciousness are, as a general thing, voluntary; 



222 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

but the work of thinking impresses on one the task 
of so classifying these impressions, and of instituting 
such processes of truthful examination into these 
impressions, as will educe from them a meaning 
that will bear the test of reason and judgment. 
It is one thing to apply yourself by hearing or ob- 
serving or reading or traveling, and it is another 
to think while you hear and observe and read and 
travel. Many persons read a great deal and travel 
much ; they also move about with open eyes and 
attentive ears, and by the help of a well-trained 
memory they retain much of what they read and 
see. All this they may have done, and the credu- 
lous multitude may marvel at their parrot-like re- 
citals ; yet these may never have performed the 
sublime labor of thought in all their lives. But 
few men and women ever learn to think at all. To 
do this, the mind must be disciplined. You must 
bring to your aid the force of a resolute will, a de- 
termined energy, and an unconquerable persever- 
ance. It may weary the frame; it may make the 
heart faint, and the brow may often throb — yet toil 
on, for your labor will bring its reward. Rapturous 
indeed is it to lay tribute on the quick-coming fan- 
cies that pour into the mind and the impressions 
made on the consciousness, and from these to ex- 
tract a living, glowing thought ! It is from thence- 
forth yours — the child of your brain — and will be to 
you a "thing of beauty" and "a joy forever." How 
many of you have thus learned to think, and who 
do think ? who work out for yourselves, under God, 
the great problems that meet you everywhere in 



The Philosophy of Life. 223 

jour search after truth ? who have individuality of 
thought, never ignoring the help that others offer, 
yet never surrendering your own personality ? keep- 
ing in solemn exercise your own powers, yet hold- 
ing these in abeyance always to the higher decis- 
ions of revelation? How many, we repeat, are 
giving culture like this to their minds ? Alas, 
alas ! have not the majority of this generation more 
concern for the training of a mustache and the fit 
of a coat, more ambition for the scrubbing of a 
hand and the rouging of a cheek, than for intellectu- 
al competition ? Enter the circle of one of our fash- 
ionable assemblages, and what is the meed of merit 
most current? Is it matter, or mind? sense, or non- 
sense ? flippancy, or wisdom ? I blush that it is so, 
yet we see little else than an exhibition of cultivated 
genuflections and attitudes, and we hear but little 
more than the unmeaning laugh of affectation and 
the voluble utterances of nonsense. We appeal to 
the young here to-day, and ask, Are you content to 
fritter life away in a poor ambition like this ? Will 
you be the slaves of such an ambition — an ambition 
that gives the mind no grand outlook, no lofty 
pinion on which to ride into an altitude in harmo- 
ny with itself? In each soul here there is the germ 
of something nobler than you have attained, the ca- 
pability of something more worthy your nature than 
you have yet found. We invoke you, by your de- 
sire to be happy and your wish to be useful, to put 
away these toys and address yourselves to the tasks 
of a stalwart manhood. We appeal to the nobler 
faculties of your nature, to that ambition from 



224 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

which all growth in excellence must come, and tell 
you to arise from your sloth and by culture prepare 
yourselves for happiness and usefulness. Let that 
ambition rise higher than the graces of your person; 
let it sparkle with a glory richer than the blaze of 
your diamonds; let it be an ambition not such 
as would sit upon a throne and wear a crown and 
sway a scepter, but an ambition that would make 
you priests at the altar of knowledge and kings in 
the realm of enlarged and consecrated thought. 
This will enable you to understand yourselves; to 
fathom the deep meaning of life ; to know God — to 
behold him in the flowers of the field, the bloom 
upon the woods, and in the glory of autumnal 
robes. The pillared firmament, with its star- 
islands shining through the rent cloud-roof over 
your heads, and its crimson pall of glory laid there 
by the beams of the setting sun, will then to your 
vision all wear the garments of the divine. 

2. A second kind of discipline that we would urge 
upon your consideration is moral, or that proc- 
ess by which the inward nature is trained. This 
part of our constitution has been sadly disorgan- 
ized. The soul, with all her wonderful faculties 
and noble aspirations, has greatly degenerated from 
her high original, and requires to be held in con- 
stant check — to be wisely directed ; otherwise, all 
ner efforts to recover what she has lost will only in- 
volve her in a still greater ruin. It is necessary 
'^st to quicken her powers into action, and then 
guide them toward virtue and holiness. Her affec- 
tions also need to be watched, or they will go out 



The Philosophy of Life. 225 

after the merchandise of a bankrupt world. It is 
perhaps one of the most difficult, even as it is one 
of the most important, tasks in this work of disci- 
pline to establish a perfect equilibrium between the 
mental and moral nature. There can be no true 
harmony of life without this. We hear much said 
of beautiful characters. His character is most beau- 
tiful who in his self-culture has kept the head 
and heart abreast ; whose mental and moral forces 
have been made mutually helpful ; who has con- 
nected by a bond of equality these two great hem- 
ispheres of his being — suffering neither to outstrip 
the other, but bearing each on in the path of prog- 
ress until they become equal parts of one harmo- . 
nious whole. Such a character is complete. It 
may not be perfect, for it can grow and expand as 
long as life lasts, and even through eternity. We 
see many persons engaged in what might be called 
a one-sided culture. They either give all attention 
to the mental to the neglect of the moral, and in 
this way become skeptical, or they sacrifice every 
thing to the moral, and by this means are in danger 
of running into bigotry. Now, the truth here is, 
as it usually is, in the middle — is between these ex- 
tremes. If you would meet the ends of life, and 
become a fully developed man or woman — a bless- 
ing to yourself, a benefaction to your race, and an 
honor to your God — harmonize your nature. It is 
a grand nature ; yet if it be not poised well, it will 
be only a grand ruin, a mournful wreck. There- 
fore we cannot insist too strongly on this unity of 
the thinking and feeling faculties, this accordance 
15 



226 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

between the mental and moral nature. Just look 
around and see how many lives are but incarnate 
ruins for the lack of it; and especially among some 
of the most gifted of our race, men who have de- 
voted years to toil and vigils, that the intellect 
might stand before men a grand hierarch in the 
temple of letters or science or song, and yet have 
left the moral nature as a garden luxuriant only 
with the foulest weeds of vice and the rankest 
growth of passion. O it is a sad spectacle to see 
a noble intellect permeated with the light of a 
grand but bewildered soul, a magnificent but per- 
verted spirit — one full of light, yet a light which, 
though " dark with excess of bright," only burns 
and blackens as it streams like the mad lightning 
from the angry cloud. Such antipodism between 
the mental and moral the world has often wit- 
nessed. Take as an illustration a name familiar in 
the history of song — a man of whom, if of any, it 
may be said, 

He soared untrodden heights, 
And seemed at home where angels bashful looked. 

We believe that Byron's was originally a noble 
soul ; that he had by nature moral capabilities of 
rare power; and we all know the royal grandeur of 
his intellect, the gorgeous richness and far-stream- 
ing splendor of his imagination; but alas for that 
lofty soaring mind, and for that proudly stooping 
soul, and for the nations that heard entranced the 
numbers of his song, and for the "lesser stars," of 
which Pollok speaks, that "bowed in reverence as 
he, the fierce comet of tremendous size, swept on in 



The Philosophy of Life. 227 

culminating glory ! — alas, we say, for him and for 
them, that that dark and tearless soul should have 
been lost sight of in the culture given to his mind! 
if some loving John could have led him to the 
cross in the first flush of his young manhood, and 
if during the 3 T ears of his expanding fame he had 
cultivated the moral equally with the intellectual, 
it would have orbed his name in the rainbow of a 
deathless grandeur! It would have enthroned him 
in light celestial, from whence with an unclouded 
fame he would have held his way on in the heaven 
of immortality, destined to shed a beautiful radi- 
ance on the evening of the world ! But instead of 
that he, after he had 

Drank every cup of joy, heard every trump 

Of fame, drank early, deeply drank, drank draughts 

That common millions might have quenched, then died 

Of thirst because there was no more to drink : 

As some ill-guided bark, well-built and tall, 

Which angry tides cast out on desert shore, 

And then retiring left it there to rot 

And molder in the winds and rains of heaven, 

So he cut from the sympathies of life, 

And cast ashore from pleasure's boisterous surge; 

A wandering, weary, worn, and wretched thing, 

A gloomy wilderness of dying thought, 

Eepined, and groaned, and withered from the earth ; 

a melancholy proof that no amount of intellectual 
wealth can atone for want of spiritual culture. 
This mournful example, which belongs to the 
world, appeals to you all for harmony of life. It 
tells you to so regulate your inward and outward 
nature, to so blend them into one accordant sound, 
one great harmony, as that it may send forth a rich 



228 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

melody from every part and measure of your psalm 
of life. 

The discipline to which we have urged you can 
be wrought only by an intense struggle, and it is 
this that causes so many failures among our young 
people in their efforts to accomplish it. It is natu- 
ral for the fresh young soul, just entering with un- 
stained affections and impassioned hopes upon life, 
to be smitten with the charms of that harmony we 
have this day depicted. They give it unqualified 
reverence, they see and confess to its nobility, and 
under the impulse of those better aspirations which 
a good God implants in the soul — and especially if 
some kind and sympathizing and loving nature, 
by those strange affinities that sometimes conse- 
crate the first hour of meeting as the bridal- 
hour of a tender and holy friendship, should prof- 
fer them aid — under these and kindred impulses, 
we say, the young enter ardently and hopefully 
upon the task of rounding their lives into a 
beauty and harmony that will bring them bless- 
edness; yet many of these — alas that it is so! 
— find the task so beset with difficulties, and the 
struggle one of such intensity that they sink dis- 
couraged and despairing, and submit to bank- 
ruptcy, when if they had but toiled bravely they 
might have become rich in this heritage of bless- 
edness. Now, that you may not be deceived, we 
tell you that this harmony is born of toil — that 
none have ever worn its garland without first hav- 
ing to struggle ; and that you may deport yourself 
becomingly in this struggle, we will endeavor to 



The Philosophy of Life. 229 

show you the philosophic reason why this struggle 
is inseparably linked with all earnest lives. 

Its cause is to be found in your organization. 
That organization connects the tenderest sensibili- 
ty with the largest activity. No order of animal 
existence combines these so perfectly as man. By 
sensation he is connected with nature, and by ac- 
tivity he has power to subdue nature. Left to 
mere sensation, he becomes the slave of the natural 
or earthly; but by virtue of the active forces within 
him he can reverse the order and make nature their 
ally. And to ascend a step, by sensation he is con- 
nected with all humanity, and is inclined to lose 
sight of his personality; but by activity he has the 
power to declare and hold inviolate that person- 
ality, to think and act for himself, and in his own 
sacred individuality to become like the only exem- 
plar of a perfect humanity. Now, between these 
two elements in his organization — both needful, 
when rightly proportioned, to true harmony of life, 
yet each inclining to a different direction — between 
these centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of his 
nature, we say, there is a continual contest with 
those who are really striving to live nobly; and 
hence every man who would make his life a serene 
harmony, an accordant melody, must expect to 
be engaged in struggles as long as he lives. These 
struggles are from within and from without — are 
inward and outward. They cannot be avoided as 
long as the soul is resolved on living right. They 
belong to our organization — differing, it is true, in 
different persons and according to different circum- 



230 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

stances, yet inhering in all natures who have wed- 
ded themselves to duty and whose purpose is to do 
duty at all hazards and at any cost. But the strug- 
gle to which we would more particularly invite 
you, as being most important, is that which is from 
within. It includes that activity which the soul 
puts forth as she attempts to rise superior to the 
evil of which she is conscious — the evil that is 
within, that is a part of her, and which she would 
conquer. It includes also the attempt she makes 
to triumph over those outward circumstances of 
life that tend to increase that evil, such as are 
found connected with social life, with the current 
maxims of business, and with the usages and fol- 
lies born of society and made dangerous because 
adopted and indorsed by fashion. ISTow, this in- 
ward evil and these fountains from without tha 1 
feed it make up a formidable opposition to what 
we are summoning you to. The element of antag- 
onism is, as you see, within you in the form of 
depraved nature — a heart naturally in league with 
sin, and made the more difficult of subjection, as 
we have shown, because the social constitution is 
unfortunately too often in keeping with this in- 
ward depravity ; while the Church itself, instead of 
making aggressions on this social constitution, as 
she should, compromises her own purity and be- 
comes a partaker of the wrong. Therefore the se- 
verest struggles of your life will be from within, 
and these will be increased in intensity by the sur- 
roundings that are without. Some of you will have 
a severe contest with unamiable tempers ; others of 



The Philosophy of Life. 231 

you with appetites adverse to purity — with passions 
that war against peace of mind and holiness of 
heart ; in a word, with the essence of evil as it ex- 
ists in the nature, and with its manifestations made 
through the social principle as we stand related to it. 

These are the contests that lie before you in the 
way of a true life; and yet in all these you may 
prove yourself victorious. We would encourage 
you, it is true — yet we would not deceive you; and 
therefore we tell you that the victor's song can only 
be sung by him who with a soldier's arm has con- 
quered his foes. 

The Church is already cursed and humanity kept 
far in the background by the miserable and beggarly 
lives of so many who profess to be living unto God. 
it is pitiable to look upon these caricatured lives — 
this burlesqued godliness, in which is seen no gen- 
tleness, no charity, no overflowing sympathy, no 
beautiful harmony, no elevated cheerfulness, no 
grand serenity, such as shone out with such com- 
manding glory in the life of Him who should be our 
example; but instead worldliness, earthly-minded- 
ness, materialism — in a word, a wild, jarring dis- 
cord, with no sweet melodies by which to win the 
world from sin and consecrate it to good. There- 
fore while we tell you to enter upon a new life, we 
tell you also that to come up to its full maximum 
you must count on having to put forth energy; you 
must expect to have your struggles ; you must pre- 
pare for battle, for a warfare whose engagements 
will be severe and protracted, but of whose final is- 
sues, thank God, there can be no doubt, if you 



232 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

but prove faithful to the end. we are thankful 
that while religion tells us we must suffer, it bids 
us rejoice and be exceeding glad, because our re- 
ward is in heaven. We are thankful too that the 
soul of a good man may always, no matter how sor- 
rowing, be calm as the orbed sun, that shining 
above the lowering storm knows no darkening 
shadow; that he has an immovable foundation 
whereon to rest when the floods are high, and a 
royal shelterage when the tempest comes. It was 
this vision of faith rising up before the psalmist as 
he suffered that wrung from him those jubilant 
shouts whose echoing strains have floated around 
the death-beds of the dying, putting on lips where 
death had planted his paleness words of triumph- 
glorious words which, as the ascending spirit 
passed from its prison to swell a loftier peal, lin- 
gered with the weeping throng like music from the 
verge of heaven. Give God praise, then, for life 
just as it is — for its sorrows as well as its joys, for 
its suffering as well as its gladness ; for suffering 
itself is sacred when sent or permitted of God. It 
is a scourge, it is true, yet there is healing in its 
stripes. It is a chalice, and we know the drink is 
often bitter, but we know also that strength may 
come from that very bitterness. It is a crown of 
thorns, but under the strange alchemy of an over- 
ruling Providence it sometimes becomes a wreath 
of light to the brow it has lacerated. 

Now, young friends, will you go forth resolved 
from this day so to number your days as that you 
may apply your hearts unto wisdom? Live not for 



The Philosophy of Life. 233 

the world, but for God and humanity. We tell you 
this day that its smiles are mockeries and its favor 
gilded deceit, and that you may find it true when 
too late. Ah ! there are many even now, with the 
smile of bright maidenhood lingering like a dream 
of heaven on their young brows, who having lived 
for the world have become heartless and distrustful 
of all that is radiant in life. Unsatisfied and disap- 
pointed, they ask, " Where are the beauty and glory, 
the sincerity and truth, which in childhood lay like 
opening flowers all around us?" Alas! they have 
sown to the wind, and are thus early reaping the 
whirlwind. They turned from religion when re- 
ligion was all they needed, and the heart has grown 
old and weary and almost dead while yet the tint 
of youth blooms unwasted on the cheek, and they 
have learned to scoff at the only thing that can 
bring happiness. 

what is woman ? what her smile, 

Her lips of love, her eyes of light ? 
What is she if her lips revile 

The lovely Jesus ? Love may write 
His name upon her marble brow, 

May linger in her curls of jet, 
The bright spring grass may scarcely bow 

Beneath her feet, and yet — and yet, 
Without that meeker grace, she is 

A lighter thing than vanity. 

Your privileges, my young friends, have been 
great. You have enjoyed the instruction of one 
whom I have known for years, and to whose rare 
qualifications for the delicate and responsible duties 
of his high profession I desire on this public occa- 



234 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

sion to bear a warm and willing testimony. You 
have had the benefit also of his able and industri- 
ous corps of instructors. These are advantages for 
which God and your generation will justly hold 
you responsible. See to it that you improve them 
faithfully, wisely, and diligently; and may the God 
of all grace help you to do this, and to remember 
all your future days so as that you may become 
wise unto salvation ! 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 



''As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my 
soul after thee, God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the 
living God: when shall I come and appear before God? My 
tears have been my meat day and night, while they continu- 
ally say unto me, Where is thy God? When I remember 
these things, I pour out my soul in me; for I had gone with 
the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with 
the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy 
day. Why art thou cast down, my soul ? and why art thou 
disquieted in me? hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise 
him for the help of his countenance." Psalm xlii. 1-5. 

THERE is this peculiarity about the book of 
Psalms which applies to no other book in the 
sacred canon — that it gives utterance to feelings 
common to every human soul; feelings, too, the 
most sacred and delicate, and which we do not dare 
to breathe to our most intimate associates and 
friends. Such feelings we have all had, and had a 
thousand times, and hence the soothing power of 
the Psalms of David. They afford relief when the 
heart is bowed down under the burden of feelings 
which cannot be uttered; and the reason why they 
give such comfort is that they mirror back to us 
what lies hidden in our own souls. We read what 
they record, and apply it to ourselves without sus- 



236 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

pecting that it is only our own self-utterances. 
Take, for instance, this forty-second Psalm, in 
which is heard the wail of a sorrow of which human 
lips but rarely speak, which was voiced by the 
lips of the suffering Son of Man when from the 
darkened hill went forth that startling appeal, 
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
This is the grief which the King of Israel had felt, 
which many since then have felt, which some of you 
— alas! many — now feel, and from which you may 
be seeking relief. It is a grief greater than lack of 
bread, greater than loss of friends, greater than the 
shipwreck of earthly hopes — in short, a grief greater 
than all other earthly griefs. It is the grief of 
spiritual desertion ; and it is in this Psalm, of all 
others, that its solitary utterances are overheard. 
The cry sent out is similar to that cry of august ag- 
ony which was poured out when the Father forsook 
the Son in the great hour of expiation for sin. It 
was the cry of a mortal, it is true ; yet it was one of 
loneliness, of despondency, of forsakenness — just 
such as has sometimes crept chillingly through your 
heart and mine ; and it is by inquiring into the cir- 
cumstances of its human utterance, as in the case 
of the psalmist, that we can expect to find hope and 
encouragement. Let us consider, then, the causes 
of his despondency, and the source of his com- 
fort under that despondency. It is clear that the 
main cause of his disquiet was the conscious ab- 
sence of a personal God, for his language was: "My 
soul thirsteth for God, the living God; when shall 
I come and appear before God? " There was in the 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 237 

first place, then, a "thirst for God," a desire, a 
longing after the infinite ; and in this he was a type 
of all humanity. God has constituted us so that 
nothing that is limited can satisfy us ; and hence 
our love of all that is boundless — of the night and 
darkness in their wondrous strength, of the sweep- 
ing sky, and of the illimitable sea. Hence, too, our 
dissatisfaction with all that has been or that can be 
done. Where, for instance, is the good that we do 
not imagine could be better ? the beauty that we do 
not conceive could be more beautiful? or the sub- 
lime which our discontent would not make sub- 
limer? There is nothing which, to our insatiable 
thirst, might not be better. Our very greatness 
places us under the destiny of an eternal restless- 
ness — a never-ending disquiet. If man were to be 
satisfied with what he does, he would have reached 
the goal of human possibility, and from that mo- 
ment he would cease to advance. But this is one 
of the impossibilities of his nature. That nature is 
"athirst for God," for infinite goodness and beauty, 
and therefore it is that nothing that man is or can 
do in this life can ever satisfy him. It is his des- 
tiny to be not dissatisfied, but forever unsatisfied; 
and this, too, because of his eternal " thirst for God ,; 
— his everlasting yearnings after the infinite. 

But the psalmist was not only " athirst for God," 
but "athirst for the living God;" and in this he 
was but the type of your soul and mine, and of our 
race. What we all want is not only infinitude, but 
personality, in the One that is infinite. We want a 
God that lives, one who not only makes love the 



238 Phil P. Mely's Sermons. 

law of his universe, but is himself a being whose 
name is Love. What we want in this world of 
manifold contrivances is a personal God, in whose 
bosom order has its center, and of whose being 
law is the expression — a personal affection, in short, 
which gives to the skies their trembling tenderness, 
and to the snow its purity, and to the rain its cleans- 
ing; for in the absence of such personality all that 
we know of wisdom and contrivance and affection 
are only so many horrible abstractions in a universe 
where man is left to grope his way in dreariness and 
solitude. 

The exceeding preciousness of the Psalms of 
David to me consists in the fact that they indicate 
the voluntary approach of the Creator to the creat- 
ure. They reveal a personal tenderness toward 
God, not as an abstraction, but as a living Being 
and Person. Almost in every page we meet with 
outbursts of passionate individual attachment which 
reveal God as a living God — as a person who asks 
and gives heart for heart, and who inspires love be- 
cause he feels it himself. 

This was the God for whom David was "athirst," 
and whose absence shrouded his soul in gloom. 
This is the God whom theologians have too often 
hid away in nature and in dogmatic text-books. 
They have seemed more anxious to give the world 
proofs of design than they were to give them God 
— concerned more about giving them doctrines than 
they were about giving them a living God. He 
differs too from the God of philosophy. Her first 
attempt was to substitute "principles " for him — 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 239 

then " laws/' until at last her God was only a law, 
into which all other laws are resolvable. 

The God for whom David thirsted, and who only 
can supplement human want, is revealed in the Bi- 
ble not only as a law, but as the life of all that is — 
as a Being who feels and is felt — a person who loves 
and is loved again — a living, personal God, who 
feels my heart throb into his, who counts the hairs 
of my head, and notices the falling sparrow; who 
feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies; who conde- 
scends even to hear my prayers, and to interpret 
them through a spirit which has affinity with my 
spirit. it is a dark moment in the history of an 
earnest, thoughtful soul when there fades from its 
consciousness a sense of this personality ! Not even 
a doubt of its immortality could give keener an- 
guish, for what would be eternity without him ? 
What would immortality be in the absence of this 
living, personal God? I know of no thought more 
hideous than that of living forever in a solitude of 
unbroken dreariness. It was the want of his con- 
scious, living presence that made David cry out, 
"My soul is athirst for the living God!" and it is 
that cry, indorsed as it has been by human experi- 
ence, that makes me say that the desire of immor- 
tality is second only to the desire of God. 

But the despondency of David was evidently in- 
creased by the taunts which the unbelieving and 
scoffing multitude hurled at him in his spiritual de- 
sertion. The opening verse of the Psalm is in 
proof of this. "As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, God." 



240 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

The idea indicated here is that he had been hunted 
down and mocked — persecuted and mocked by his 
enemies — and that this, added to the absence of the 
living God, had cast him down. "As the hart 
panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul 
after thee, O God." This figure brings before us 
the hart hunted down and at bay — its eyes liquid 
with tears, and mournful from sorrow, and its 
strength almost gone. 

"My tears," he says, "have been my meat day 
and night, while they continually say unto me, 
Where is thy God? " They had persecuted him in 
his spiritual desertion ; and in this, too, his experi- 
ence was but a foreshadowing of what you may ex- 
pect from the unbelieving multitude who, when you 
are cast down, are ever ready to ask in derision, 
"Where, now, is th}^God?" The un sympathizing 
world is always ready to misunderstand and taunt 
us in our religious perplexities. This you may look 
for. In spiritual grief they ask, " Why is he not like 
other people?" When in bereavement you sorrow 
as others do, they call your sorrow unbelief. When 
misfortune overtakes you, they comfort you as Job's 
friends did him, by calling it a retributive visitation 
of Providence. In this the world does as it did 
when the viper fastened itself on Paul at Melita. 
When they saw that, the people called him a mur- 
derer; and so when your soul is crying for an absent 
God, they will taunt you with the accusation that 
his deplored absence is proof that .you are none of 
his. These persecutors did the same with Christ 
in the awful hour of the crucifixion. When they 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 241 

heard him say, "Eloi, Eloi," they charged him with 
calling on Elias, when he was calling for the living 
God, and said, "Let us see whether Elias will come 
to save him; " taunting him at last with the words, 
" He saved others, himself he cannot save." 

Now, this want of sympathy — for, after all, it 
amounts to this — this want of sympathy, I say, 
when the soul is under a cloud, is hard to hear. It 
is an easy thing to recommend fortitude under such 
circumstances ; but it is no easy matter to bear up 
when human hands withdraw their help. It is no 
small trouble when a warm, loving nature is misun- 
derstood and falsely accused, and left to grope its 
way in darkness and without human sympathy. 
And the trouble is intensified when the relaxing 
hand is raised against you, and when the voice that 
sent you cheerful greetings in your prosperity is 
heard calling, when adversity comes, " Where is 
thy God?" 

Remember, though, that while from these causes 
this was David's condition for the time, it was not 
one of utter hopelessness. The Christian may often 
have, just as David had, a feeling of forsakenness, 
and this may subject him, as it did David, to the 
crudest taunts ; but neither this feeling nor the 
persecution it may bring is to be taken as a proof 
that God has really forsaken him. Mourning after 
an absent God is often as good and as strong an ev- 
idence of love for him as is rejoicing in a present, 
conscious Saviour. Nay, more — it is quite possible 
that a man may be more truly a child of God even 
when doubting the existence of that God, and while 
16 



242 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

crying to him in the anguish of his soul for light 
and proof and demonstration, than he who has a 
theoretical belief in the creed, and upon that ab- 
straction is yielding a cold, formal, dead religious 
service. At all events David, in his spiritual de- 
sertion and doubt and persecution, had still some 
grounds of consolation left. To these, then, your 
attention is next and briefly invited. And the first 
ground mentioned in this Psalm was hope. In an- 
swer to the question, " Why art thou cast down, 
my soul, and why art thou disquieted in me?" 
he could still stay, "Hope thou in God;" an.d in 
this he had a glorious foundation on which to plant 
himself. 

Now, there are two phases in Christian experience 
which we ought always carefully to note and to dis- 
criminate between. There is first a feeling of faith 
in a present God — a consciousness, in other words, 
that he is with us, and in us, and about us. This 
is the highest degree of religious consciousness, and 
should be sought for continually by every child of 
God. There is next, in the absence of this, a hope 
of faith that, although not consciously present, he 
exists, and will yet reveal himself, according to his 
gracious promises; and this is the hope that never 
deserts the sincere and honest Christian. It is a 
phase of experience, too, into which we are all lia- 
ble to be precipitated sometimes, and one into 
which sensitive temperaments are often thrown. 
These variations are as common in religious life as 
they are in the natural world. There are days in 
nature when the sun is veiled in clouds — in clouds 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 243 

so thick and drear as to leave us with no feeling, no 
consciousness of sunlight and sun warmth. But this 
does not destroy the hope of faith in the shining 
sun. This hope assures us that there is a sun, that 
he is shining somewhere, and that he will yet shine 
on us in the future. And so in spiritual life there 
are hours in which physical derangement darkens 
the windows of the soul; days in which shattered 
nerves make life simply endurance; months, and 
even years, in which intellectual difficulties, press- 
ing for solution, shut out God from the soul. In 
these seasons it is sadly true that 

The days seem dark and dreary — 
It rains, and the wind is never weary; 

and that the tendency of the soul then is to cling 
to the " moldering past," when its language should 

be: 

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, 
for 

Behind the cloud the sun 's still shining. 

As with David, so should it be with us. It should 
replace faith with hope, and cause us to say : " Hope 
thou in God; for I shall yet praise him, who is the 
health of my countenance, and my God." But you 
will observe next that David's hope was in God. 

Now, the mistake we often make in our seasons 
of trouble is that we look for comfort in something 
else than God. We look for it in ourselves — in 
self-contemplation, in our own feelings, or in self- 
evolved logical processes and deductions. We look 
for it just where, in the very nature of things, we 
can never find it ; and the sooner you are made to 



244 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

see this, the better will it be for you. Let us look 
into it, then, briefly. 

In the first place, the very mutability and uncer- 
tainty of your feelings make it impossible for them 
to give you permanent consolation. Nature itself 
is not more variable than our feelings. In fact, our 
feelings are themselves dependent, in a great meas- 
ure, on the mutations of nature. To-day the sun 
shines, the air is balmy, the breezes soft and inspir- 
ing, and our feelings harmonize with nature; to- 
morrow the sun is hid, the air is chilly, and we are 
gloomy and sad. At one time our hopes are un- 
reasonably elevated, at another they are as unrea- 
sonably depressed; and that too without any regard 
to our actual spiritual estate. In this way our feel- 
ings ebb and flow like the sea, which is the emblem 
of instability, and cannot therefore bring us any 
abiding comfort. If we turn to what we do, we 
will find that equally unreliable, for, although hu- 
man actions constitute the true test of character, no 
man can judge justly of his own acts. Sinners 
cannot judge of sin, simply because human conduct 
always assumes a hue kindred to the eye by which 
it is contemplated. And even when this law is con- 
travened by the Spirit and grace of God, so as to 
enable the soul to form a just estimate of sin, the 
result is remorse instead of comfort. For instance, 
if I see the sin of yesterday as it stands unveiled in 
the light of God's grace and Spirit, I spend the 
whole of to-day in mourning over it. And if I 
spend to-day in mourning over the wasted yester- 
day, I shall have to spend to-morrow in lamenting 



David's Despondency and Comfort. 245 

the wasted to-day; and in this way I should make 
life one perpetual remorse. We must do as David 
did — hope in God rather than in our feelings, which 
are so mutable and so deceiving ; or in our own 
acts, of which we are naturally so poorly prepared 
to judge, and which, when we judge of them, ac- 
cording to the revelations of divine truth, are so 
well calculated to drive us into hopeless despair. 
When cast down and depressed under a sense of 
unfaithfulness, as every true Christian often is, we 
must hope in God, in his abundant mercy, in his 
gracious promises, and in his infinite love. When 
the children of Israel were about to perish in the 
wilderness, they were told to look not to themselves, 
not to any human means, for recovery, but to an in- 
strumentality which God had lifted up for their 
healing. Now, if instead of gazing on the serpent 
as he had directed, they had looked down on their 
own wounds to watch the process of the granulation 
of the flesh, to find out how deep the wound was, 
and to see whether it was healing slowly or fast — if 
they had turned away from the divinely instituted 
means of recovery, and had employed their time in 
this way, their cure would have been impossible. 
Every thing depended on their looking away from 
their wounds and up to the appointed remedy. So 
it is, my brethren, with us when we feel that our 
sins have driven God away from us, and left us with 
our souls cast down and burdened. It is not by an- 
alyzing our feelings that we can bring him back; 
it is not by looking at ourselves that we can pro- 
pitiate him. It is by looking to God, as did the 



246 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

stricken Israelite in the wilderness, that we can 
hope for comfort. It is only when we give up this 
hopeless and sickening work of self-inspection and 
turn to God — it is only by this Christian self-ob- 
livion, and this gazing on God, that we can expect 
the renewal of our spiritual consolation. It may 
be that I speak to some whose souls are "athirst for 
God;" some who are "cast down" because of his 
absence; some who are now feeling the agony of 
spiritual desertion, and whose souls are panting for 
God "as the hart panteth after the water brooks.'' 
To all such I would say, " Hope in God," for he 
loves you and pities you. O I rejoice to know that 
the God in whom we are to hope is not affected by 
our mutability, and that the changes which so often 
come upon us do not alter him ! I rejoice to know — 
and this, brethren, is my only hope — that while we 
are restless he remains calm, serene, and eternally 
benignant; that while we are low and selfish and 
mean, and liable to become dispirited, he continues 
unalterable — the same yesterday, to-day, and for- 
ever, and in whom "is no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning." This is the only comfort left 
to me in my own imperfect, erring, and beggared 
life. And this comfort I hold out to you to whom 
I minister, and who, under a deep sense of spiritual 
desertion, are often constrained to cry out, " Why 
art thou cast down, my soul, and why art thou 
disquieted in me?" To all such I say, "Hope 
thou in God," and am authorized to promise that 
this hope shall issue in everlasting praise. 



A Happy Old Age. 



"How old art thou?" Genesis xlvii. 8. 

THIS, my friends, is a question of profound sig- 
nificance. It comes as a voice to arrest us in 
our pilgrimage to the grave, and bids us retrace the 
steps of gladness or of weariness we have taken, 
and inquire what evil we have overcome, what 
passions we have subdued, what virtues we have 
nurtured, what success we have had in disciplining 
the mind and heart, with what comeliness we have 
fashioned our souls, or what deformities we have 
suffered to remain in the midst of the manifold 
helps which the good God has given for their re- 
moval. It is also a question from which most of 
us shrink when once we have planted our feet 
firmly in the path of manhood and womanhood, 
and have begun the journey in earnest. Indeed, 
with some people it is an exceedingly delicate 
question — one which it is considered altogether 
against popular etiquette to ask, and which some 
have resolutely determined not to answer, as if 
silence would stop the plowshare of time, or keep 
the opening furrows concealed. These silent ones, 
though, should not be condemned too hastily. They 
are but following an instinct which is universal, 



248 Phil P. Neehfs Sermons. 

and which asserts their immortality — an instinctive 
yearning for perpetual youth. There is a feeling 
in the soul — all men have it — that recoils from the 
thought of growing old. It may be accounted for, 
at least with the virtuous and good — with these it 
may be accounted for on the ground that while the 
body is giving indications of age the soul within it 
feels nothing of decay. The dissimilarity in this 
respect between the temple and its inhabitant — the 
one falling into dilapidation and the powers of the 
other expanding and enlarging the while, makes 
age to the soul a thing that seems unnatural; there- 
fore it shrinks from the thought that the house 
in which it abides is becoming old and must soon 
be laid in the dust. It seems to struggle against 
the conviction, unwilling to admit it to itself. But 
after all our efforts to keep age away, it will come 
if life be continued. The hair will whiten, the eye 
will go back into its cavernous depths, the limbs 
will become feeble, the step tottering, and the day 
will come to each one of us to whom life shall be 
prolonged when, in tl*e sad words of Solomon, 
"the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the 
strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders 
shall cease because they are few, and those that look 
out of the windows be darkened." Yes, we are all 
going onward to that time, some on the threshold of 
the way, and some far along the journey, and with 
all of us " wrinkles will either be made out in 
God's sunlight among living things, b}~ the hand of 
Time, or by worms working in the dark mold." 
Now, since this is destiny, inevitable destiny — 



A Happy Old Age. 249 

since age must and will come with the trailing 
years — our purpose at this hour is to point out the 
way by which we can keep the soul always fresh 
and young and happy — the art, as one has called it, 
of growing old gracefully and happily. 

My subject, novel as it ma} T seem, is one in which 
you are all most deeply interested, and I hope to 
have your attention. Were I to propose to tell you 
of the fabled fountain of youth — to show you that 
it was a reality — but little that I would say, however 
commonplace, would be forgotten. I come, my 
friends, to tell you of a better fountain, the golden 
water of which you can all have without the travel 
of many miles and the expenditure of money. 
Hear me, then, and remember what I may say when 
you go home and in all your future life. 

The great secret of growing old happily ma} T be 
given in one word — love. This is the alchemist in 
whose forge the passing years are to be refined of 
their decaying tendencies — the alembic in which 
age, when cast, comes forth radiant with the light 
of immortal youth. By love we do not mean pas- 
sion; we mean that sentiment which purity and 
goodness call into existence, and from which 
pleasure, rational and refining, follows. In this 
sense love and sympathy are almost interchange- 
able. He who has sympathy has that part of love 
which is nearest akin to heaven; and it is of love 
thus hallowed that we speak ; it is this love that 
will enable us to ''grow old gracefully and happily." 
Now, it is the soul that is susceptible of this love, 
and hence, in all our efforts to prepare for a happy 



250 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

old age, especial attention should be directed to its 
culture and relations. 

1. And now the first direction we would give is 
that love be kept in strong sympathy with the young. 
This, if the inward nature be rightly regulated, will 
be an easy task, and for the reason that God has 
implanted it as an instinct in the soul. He has 
so created us that the heart of age naturally turns 
toward the young as to an influence that will not 
only be conservative of health, but serve as a pre- 
ventive to that depressing influence which age 
brings to the body. We may divert this tendency, 
we may change this instinct, by an indurating, 
worldly process; and it is of your exposedness to 
this danger that we would warn you. Let a man 
so give himself up to business or pleasure or am- 
bition as to have no time or disposition to romp 
with his children, no hours of relaxation in which 
he can enter into the spirits and feelings, the stud- 
ies and amusements of the young, and he will soon 
degenerate into an incarnate ledger or sensualist, 
according to his pursuit. No man reaches this 
condition, though, without a struggle, for God has 
given love for the young as the soul's first and 
richest portion; and even when business and 
care and sorrow have almost despoiled us of this 
portion, we sometimes in our bitter moments cry 
out: 

"0 would, I were a boy again, 

When life seemed formed of sunny years, 
And all the heart then knew of pain 

Was wept away in transient tears ! " 

It was to us the beautiful gate of the temple of 



A Happy Old Age. 251 

life. "It matters little how gorgeous the temple 
maybe when entered, how majestic the arches, how 
long the vista, how richly illuminated and embla- 
zoned the windows, or how heavenly the music that 
thrills its iris-tinted silence, we never forget the 
precious moments spent in lingering at the portal, 
the glorious rosette above it, and the sky-born mel- 
ody of the chimes that filled our ears and hearts 
with welcome." God bless the dear children, we 
say, for with all their little faults of temper and 
speech, they are the best part of the world ! Apart 
from its utility, it is goodness, unspeakable good- 
ness in God to hallow our firesides with the pres- 
ence of children. They are the violets in the gar- 
den of humanity which he sends to gladden the 
desert of life and to make beautiful our homes. 
And even when after time has transformed them 
into the stalwart workers of the age, they come to us 
again in the forms of grandchildren, as if the good 
God would surround us with these angels of the way 
until the journey ends, and we pass up to our own 
immortal youth. As an evidence of this instiuct, 
we point you to the additional fact that all our 
ideals wear to us the form and beauty of youth. 
We never create them old, nor does imagination 
ever allow age to be connected with them. The 
ideals of fiction, too, are always young. The em- 
bodiments of poetry come to us clothed in youthful 
attributes. We dream of our dead not as old or 
wasted, although they may have passed into the 
grave with tottering footsteps and emaciated forms. 
The mother, who with the silver of sixty winters 



252 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

beneath her snowy cap we laid awa}^ in the church- 
yard, comes to us in our night visions not as when 
we parted from her, but radiant with the beauty of 
youth; we think of meeting her not as one old 
and infirm and decrepit, but as one from whom 
every trace of age will have disappeared. u There 
are to be no thin, silvery carls upon the brow of 
that mother, but in some sweet way all the hal- 
lowed graces of maternity and the unfathomable 
tenderness of a soul disciplined by sorrow are to be 
associated — interspersed — with the beauty and youth 
of the bride." So do we think of our dead, and so 
do we think of the angels. To the soul immortal- 
ity is always young, and heaveu and youth everlast- 
ing and inseparable thoughts. 

Now, if you would grow old happily, cultivate 
this instinctive love for the young, for childhood, 
for youth — for young manhood and young woman- 
hood. I do not envy that man's dignity whose 
stereotyped rigidity cannot unbend to the sports of 
children, nor do I desire to emulate that man's re- 
ligion who frowns into silence the playful ebul- 
lience of the young, to whom the school-boy's lusty 
shout and the school-girl's joyous laugh are an in- 
sult to the moral law, and whose presence is as 
the shadow of death in the presence of young men 
and maidens. Such a man may be young in years, 
but he is an antediluvian in heart and feeling and 
soul. Let no such man be trusted, for he is a the- 
ologic fossil, and belongs to an age that is dead. 

2. Next in order as a help to a happy old age we 
would recommend connubial sympathy, or the love 



A Happy Old Age. 253 

that hallows the marriage bond. According to 
Genesis man was created first, and then as his 
complement woman; and the two became one. 
Therefore, marriage is of God; and all history, in- 
dividual and national, is in proof that morality and 
happiness have been made to depend on its sanctified 
observance. ; ' The springs of the soul," it has been 
said, "abide in the affections." If these are prop- 
erly fed, either by love of the young or by love in 
its higher and stronger manifestations, they mount 
into perennial youth. ISText above the love of the 
young, therefore, comes connubial love, as a con- 
servator of the youthful feeling of the soul. Two 
married hearts that come together in early life, and 
have lived in the harmony and love which consti- 
tute real marriage, never grow old. The love they 
bear to one another is an immortal thing. It is as 
fond and tender as it was when they pledged their 
faith to each other at the altar. Such a love as this 
can rise from no other than an immortal fountain. 
The fires of passion may die, desire may burn out 
like a candle, yet, chastened and purified, this love 
■ — a product of essential youth — becomes the con- 
servator of youth. The pine in your forests pro- 
duces its resin, and the resin preserves the pine 
from decay centuries after the life that produced it 
has passed away. So with real affection in married 
life. It is the spring from which comes forth the 
elixir of life, and whosoever drinketh reverently 
and faithfully has found the unwasting fountain of 
youth, has passed through the guarded gate into 
his recovered paradise. To true marriage, such 



254 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

as God ordained — marriage entered into from a 
sober conviction that each has found in the other 
his moral and intellectual complement, she her 
wise counselor and strong protector, and he his 
tender friend, the answering voice to the demands 
of his soul, the attending and ministering compan- 
ion of his earthly life — such marriages will keep the 
spring violets fragrant in the soul while the winds 
of white winter are beating around the mortal ten- 
ement. 

3. There is yet another manifestation of love on 
the culture of which much of the beauty of old 
age depends — our love for man as our brother 
in sorrow and struggle and discipline. There is 
nothing that will more surely deaden the soul and 
blunt the sensibilities and the affections than self- 
ishness. Its influences are so certain that you can 
read their record even on the face of youth — in the 
hard lines, the compressed lip, the sinister glance, 
and that indescribable haze which seems to shut in 
every good impulse and generous sentiment which 
nature longs to send out in youth-time from every 
soul. How else than ossified can such a soul be- 
come, forced in upon itself, with no receptivity, 
no prepared, fallow ground, no glad affections nor 
good deeds to send out into the broad field of hu- 
manity on embassies of love and good-will ? It 
must by the inexorable law of fate become, in 
process of time, a fetid lake, walled in from the 
healthful breezes and sunlight, reeking with deadly 
malaria and sending out only stench and corrup- 
tion. The feeling of age to such a soul has been 



A Happy Old Age. 255 

compared to the effect on life which being 
doomed to live "in an old damp house, dingy 
with dirt and reeking with rottenness," has. It 
draws away the vital forces ; it diseases the affec- 
tions; it puts out love; and would, if any thing 
could, drink up immortality itself. 

If you would grow old gracefully and happily, 
then, put away selfishness, and place yourself in 
sympathy with your race. That race is made up 
of immortality like yourself — veiled, it is true, and 
sinful, yet with you it is struggling to cast off that 
veil and to eradicate that sin ; and what more nat- 
ural than that from a common struggle like this 
there should be born a common affection and sym- 
pathy? 

It is sad to think of the estrangements to which 
these common sufferers give themselves, the coldness 
and falseness in which they indulge, the Ishmaelitish 
warfare in which they engage, while there is so much 
to draw them together, and when it is so obviously 
to their interest to be united. If we examine this 
question we will find that the whole human race 
is a vast community with a common origin, with 
common sufferings — sharing in common blessings, 
engaged in a common conflict, journeying toward a 
common grave, and destined to a common immor- 
tality. Why, then, these artificial distinctions, this 
warfare of classes and interests and individuals? 
The good God whom we are to imitate sends his 
sunshine and his rain upon all alike. In his wise 
ordination the food he gives is as sweet to the plow- 
man as to the man of wealth and luxury. If the lat- 



256 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

ter has the daintier dish, the former has the better 
appetite. "Into all ears the brook pours the same 
stream of music, and the birds never vary their pro- 
gramme with reference to their audiences. The 
spring scatters flowers broadcast; and grass grows 
by the road-side as well as in the park. The breeze 
that tosses the curls of your little ones and mine 
is not softer in its caresses of those who bound 
over velvet to greet it. The sun shines, the rain 
falls, the trees dress themselves in green, the thun- 
der rolls, and the stars flash for all alike. Health 
knows nothing of human distinctions, and abides 
with him who treats it best. Sleep, the gentle an- 
gel of all, does not come at the call of power, and 
never proffers its ministry for gold. The senses, 
take no bribe of luxury, but deal as honestly and 
generously by the poor as by the rich." 

Now, this teaching of a common providence 
should convince us of a common relationship; and 
this common relationship should beget a common 
desire to help each other. He who is most diligent 
in giving this help, and most earnest in his sympa- 
thy for his brotherhood, will, other things being 
equal, be best prepared for enjoyment in the decline 
of life. Pleasant memories of a life where bene- 
dictions have descended upon his race will come 
as perfume from wasted roses; and though the vase 
may be broken, "the scent of the roses will hang 
round it still." Live thus, my friends, no matter 
what may be your condition or employment. It 
is a great mistake to suppose that this spirit of 
well-doing is restricted to the great and rich. It 



A Happy Old Age. 257 

may enter into every life. "It is the right appre- 
hension of things only that is wanting to make the 
peasant cottage as glorious as the palace of the 
prince. Most men look upon their employments 
as commonplace." They feel as if some other 
condition and calling would be more favorable to 
the manifestations of that sympathy we are com- 
mending. The plastered wall, the humble table, 
the poor fare, and the daily toil — how opposed all 
this seems to these laborers of love! and they think 
that could they live in palaces of marble and be 
clothed in fine apparel, and move about in state 
with plenty of money, they could and would do 
much. My friends, this work of sympathy can go 
on in the humblest abodes as well as in the highest. 
A human heart throbs beneath the beggar's gabar- 
dine as warmly as the king's does under his royal 
purple; and it is the heart that gives out this sym- 
pathy, and in giving it out feeds its immortality. 
41 Thou livest in a world of beauty and grandeur, 
a dwelling which God hath built for thee; and here 
thou art to perform thy ministries of sympathy to 
men. If thy circle is small, all thou hast to do is to 
fill it with gladness. If God enlarge it, then thou 
wilt have the more work to do. Only be content 
to work where you are, leaving it to the great 
Overseer to choose whether it is best to go higher 
or remain where thou art." 

"There are those who, with a noble but mistak- 
en aspiration, are asking for a life which shall in 
its form and outward course be more spiritual and 
divine than that in which they are obliged to live. 
17 



258 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

They think that if they could devote themselves 
entirely to what are called works of philan- 
thropy — to visiting the poor and sick — it would 
be something worthy of their efforts; and so it 
would be. They think that if it could be in- 
scribed on their tombstones that they had visited 
millions in sickness, and carried balm and sooth- 
ing to as many hearts, it would be a glorious 
record ; and so it would be. But let me tell you, 
my friends, that the million occasions will come — 
will come too in the ordinary paths of life, in your 
homes and by your firesides — wherein you may act 
as nobly, and show as real a sympathy as if all 
your life long you had visited beds of sickness and 
pain. These occasions will come, I say, varying 
every hour — occasions in which you may restrain 
your passions, subdue your hearts to gentleness 
and patience, resign your interest for another's ad- 
vantage, speak words of kindness and wisdom, 
raise the fallen and cheer the fainting and sick in 
spirit, and soften and assuage "the weariness and 
bitterness of many a mortal lot," and in this way 
weave a crown of rejoicing for your head when the 
snows of four-score years shall have silvered your 
locks. 

friends, for want of this love, this human sym- 
pathy, the earth is desolate and the heavens are 
but a speaking- vault or celestial mechanism. For 
want of this, life with many is dull and barren — 
without interpretation or meaning or lofty motive. 
For want of it, thousands who might claim a better 
destiny are drifting onward toward an old age in 



A Happy Old Age. 259 

which there will be no fresh affections, no sanctified 
memories, no treasured benedictions wafted from a 
holy life — nothing but loneliness, remorse, and to 
thousands the blackness of despair. 

4. But more than all as a means of making old 
age blessed is sympathy with God and harmony 
with his administration and laws. This is a love 
which is above every other. It has the possibility 
of a deeper depth, a broader width, and a higher 
attitude than any other love, because its object is 
not only infinite, eternal, and immortal, but he is 
the supreme God. He is the author also of that 
immortality which is to be put in sympathy with 
him. He is its great source and center and end. 
If we will but make ourselves acquainted with our 
relations to him — will live in harmony with those re- 
lations, will send our hearts out to him in constant, 
child-like, filial love — our souls will never wear the 
signs of age no more than God himself. He is 
and forever will be immortally young. The uni- 
verse is his — like our bodies, it is to wax old and 
die; yet, when lives have gone out and systems 
have perished, God the immortal will live. So when 
age comes and infirmities crowd upon us, if we 
have put our immortal nature in love and harmony 
with his immortality, our souls will still be young 
and fresh and glorious. Love will have sealed them 
with immortal youth — love of the young, love of 
children, love of bosom companions, love of our fel- 
low-man, and more than all, and above all, love of 

God. It is 

Love, the divinest of the train, 
The sovereign of the rest, 



260 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

that weaves this beautiful chaplet for the brow of 
age ; and he who has most love has most happi- 
ness, as he stands the last of his generation, the 
young heaping their ministries of love upon him, 
and the glad angels waiting to bear him to his God. 

These, my dear young friends, are the timely 
directions we would give you to a happy old 
age. Follow them, and you need not fear the 
march of time nor shudder as the hour comes 
when you will find your locks tinged with gray 
and the long furrows beginning on your brow. 
Keep the heart fresh, and the soul will always be 
young. Cultivate a deep and earnest sympathy for 
those just bounding into the path of life, a deep de- 
votion to those who are walking side by side with 
you along that path, and more than all keep your 
soul in perpetual harmony with God and goodness 
and heaven. Then, to you, age instead of stealing 
away your true strength and blessedness will bring 
a large increase of each. Then, as with feeble step 
you move among the generation yet to come, the 
light of love beaming from your brow, and the 
tone of sympathy issuing from your lips, will draw 
the young around you in filial reverence, and their 
love will be to you as dew to the drooping plant. 

We talk of the strength of young manhood, and 
of the beauty of early womanhood ; and strong he is, 
and majestic and beautiful too is she in her sweet 
thoughts and hopes and radiance; but there is no 
strength like that of old age strong in love — there 
is no beauty equal to that of old age beautiful in 
affection. beautiful age ! thrice beautiful! I rev- 



' A Happy Old Age. 261 

erence you when I look upon you thus, for in the 
serenity and peace that sit like twin monarchs on 
the brow of the old. who are thus sanctified I be- 
hold the truest types of the beneficent God; the 
gentle words and kindly sympathies for the young 
that fall from their honored lips seem to me most 
akin to the soft speech of God's angels; and more 
than all to me, such is the old age of her who gave 
me birth, and who to my vision is even now, totter- 
ing as she is under the burden of eighty years, beau- 
tiful in her holy sympathies, her tender love, her 
calm Christian trust, and her perfect ripeness for 
her heavenfy home. Some of you have memories 
this day of those who were thus beautiful to you, 
but who have been removed to the fountain of im- 
mortal youth. The gate-way has opened, and they 
have been led through bv the angels and are with 
God. Why weep for them, when you know that 
they rest from life's labors, and that their works do 
follow them? 

Ye are not sad to see the gathered grain, 
Nor when the mellow fruits the orchards cast, 
Nor when the yellow woods shake down the ripened mast; 
Ye sigh not when the sun, his course fulfilled, 
His glorious course, rejoicing earth and sky, 
In the soft evening, when the winds are stilled, 
Sinks where his islands of refreshment lie, 
And leaves the smile of his departure spread 
O'er the warm-colored heaven and ruddy mountain head; 
Why weep ye then for him who having won 

The bounds of man's appointed years at last, 
Life's blessings all enjoyed, life's labors done, 
Serenely to his final rest has passed, 
While the soft memory of his virtues yet 
Lingers like twilight hues when the sun has set ? 



The Final Deliverance. 



" For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for 
the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was 
made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him 
who hath subjected, the same in hope; because the creature 
itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we 
know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves 
also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves 
groan within ourselves, w r aiting for the adoption, to wit, the 
redemption of our body." Romans viii. 19-23. 

THESE words have been justly regarded by 
many as exceedingly difficult of comprehen- 
sion. Some, understanding the apostle as having 
before him as his object an exhibition of the 
Christian's hope of a resurrection, restrict the pas- 
sages in their application to Jhat change which the 
body is to undergo in its revival from the grave. 
Others give to these scriptures a wider interpreta- 
tion. They comprehend in the meaning of the 
terms creature and creation all things animate and 
inanimate. They accordingly hold that inasmuch 
as this entire planet, including the vegetable, ani- 
mal, and rational existences of which it is composed, 
has suffered by the introduction of sin into the 
world, so also will it in all these departments par- 



The Final Deliverance. 263 

take of that deliverance necessitated by the exist- 
ence of evil and originating in the love which the 
Father bears toward the subjects of his fashioning 
hand. To this august meaning of these words of 
wonderful import we have been compelled from 
the weight of conviction to yield. We cannot re- 
gard them as announcing a deliverance less glorious 
than the bondage in which the imprisoned groaned, 
or as promising a renovation less majestic than the 
prostration of the temple was awful. As far as ruin 
had wasted the palace in which God had placed his 
noble image, or as sin had disrupted the harmony 
of its occupant, so far do we understand the text 
as giving assurance of the remodeling of the one 
and a restoration of the other. So far as the har- 
mony of creation has been interrupted, or the in- 
tellectual deranged, or the moral impaired, so far 
does the text give promise of regainment. We 
understand it as setting forth the grand spectacle of 
a world with its millions of diversified existences, 
comprehending those guided by instinct and those 
endowed with reason, and including with these the 

whole material beino; — all as destined to a magnifi- 
es © 

cent deliverance and renovation. It also indicates 
that of this deliverance, or renovation, there is also 
a general expectation among all its subjects mani- 
fested by the groans and convulsive agonies of a 
world restless under the irrepressible desire; for, 
says the apostle, "the whole creation groaneth 
and travaileth in pain together until now." 

What a picture this presents of a ruined world 
— a torn and disrupted creation, a homeless orb, 



264 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

sobbing though all its forms of animal and intel- 
lectual life, and all sending into the ear of the In- 
finite a groaning and travailing supplication for de- 
liverance ! "And not only they," continues the 
apostle, "but ourselves also, which have the first- 
fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within 
ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the re- 
demption of our body;" even these also are repre- 
sented as under the travail of a mighty expectation 
of an hour when the body, over which the banner 
of death is to wave, would burst its cerements and 
stand forth in renovated life and with renewed 
splendor — the immortal, the indestructible product 
of Him who hath unbarred the gate of immortality 
to a world in bondage to death. Such is an outline 
of the picture, the analysis of whose shades of 
gloom and light is to claim your present attention. 

The task is appropriate to the occasion of our 
solemn assemblage. We meet at the call of death. 
Another of our fellow-travelers has gone down into 
the bondage of which we are this hour to speak — 
has descended into the land of "corruption, earth, 
and worms," and awaits that deliverance which is 
to admit her into the glorious liberty of the sons of 
God. What topic, then, could be more befitting the 
mournful circumstances of the hour? and what, 
then, could have more of comfort to those who 
mourn, but whose sorrow is not without hope, than 
that of redemption from ruin and decay through 
Him that hath loved us and given himself for us? 

Therefore, we shall in the further consideration 
of these words, 



The Final Deliverance. 265 

I. Regard them as affording, first, a humiliating 
view of the bondage in which the whole creation is 
groaning and travailing, together with some of the 
attending circumstances of that bondage; and 

II. As unfolding, in the second place, that gen- 
eral deliverance, or redemption, from decay and ruin 
and death which is to pass on the whole creation. 

We are before you, my hearers, to paint a picture 
not for your approval or dislike, but for its harmony 
with truth. Therefore, we summon you, and with 
you the entire world, to the sitting; and shall now 
proceed in an attempt to do our duty faithfully, and 
fearlessly, leaving it in calm confidence to God and 
his Spirit to direct the results. 

1. The first view presented in the text is that the 
whole creation is in the bondage of corruption. 
This representation bears with it a fearful signifi- 
cance. It teaches a truth to which the instincts of 
every man and the observation of all ages have 
borne testimony, yet from the force of which the 
thoughts of the vain and worldly have been turned 
by enterprises not less profitable than they have 
proved absorbing. That truth is that all are under 
doom of death; that its sentence, with all that is 
implied primarily and secondarily in that sentence, 
has been passed on all flesh ; that it is suspended 
over all, with the authority and rigor of a law that 
is inevitable — a law for the execution of which 
God himself, from whose presence aud power there 
can be no escape, is pledged; that with the same 
inevitability it rests over the whole creation, inan- 
imate as well as animate, vegetable and animal as 



266 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

well as rational and spiritual — decomposing and 
dooming the one to decay, and shedding upon the 
other weakness, disorder, and corruption. By virt- 
ue of this law, this homestead of our race, this 
planet on which so many generations have lived 
and in whose bosom they now sleep, is under 
doom of dissolution; and thus considered, the 
whole earth is but a dying clod. We know that 
even now, amid the manifold premonitions of its 
doom that may be seen, the spirit of beauty has her 
temples here, and that the worshiping soul ma} 7 
kneel at her shrines and pay her high reverence; 
that the poet may wander amid her vernal woods, 
her solemn groves, her flowing brook-sides, her old 
mountains, her lakes and seas; and that smitten 
with the shadow of the Divine that hangs like a 
pall of glory over all these, as he sees them in the 
deep effulgence of the still morn or beneath the 
light of the blue-girdled stars, he may cry out with 
a worshiping Shelley, u O awful loveliness!" We 
know too that however doomed to decay, and how- 
ever marred creation may be, there are melodies 
running through it that entrance the soul — voices 
which, while they cause the listening spirit to grow 
enamored of their sweetness, are proof of a richer 
tide of song that must have flowed from the organ 
of creation before its cords were swept by sin and 
its harmony was broken by transgression. We 
hear them in the .sighing breeze, in the carol of 
happy birds, in the "liquid lapse of murmuring 
streams," and in the tones of love and friendship 
that bring us memories of paradise and yearnings 



The Final Deliverance. 267 

for heaven. They come to us in the voices of our 
"loved ones at home;'' they steal up from our al- 
tars of prayer, and are not only remembrances of a 
beauty that was perfect, but pledges that there will 
yet come a time when the spirit of beauty and pu- 
rity will be enthroned again amid a perfection com- 
pared with which the loveliness that has declined 
will be deformity itself. And if the visible crea- 
tion has so much to charm the eye and to gratify 
the taste in its present estate, ravaged as it has been 
by sin, with w 7 hat transcendent glory must it have 
appeared when the Divine Artist first unveiled it to 
the gaze of wondering angels, and, pronouncing it 
very good, placed it in the great family of worlds 
to sing and shine along its untried rounds. Nor 
can we estimate the growth in beauty which, ac- 
cording to the law of progress, it would have 
shared had it escaped the desolation caused by evil 
until now. Its landscapes and stretching views 
would have been gathering fresher tints as rolling 
cycles passed, while the music with which a purer 
atmosphere was then charged would have gathered 
sweetness with the flight of years, until the whole 
creation would have trembled with the thrilling 
harmony. Instead, however, of this growing afflu- 
ence of beauty and music may be seen evidences 
of a marked decline — a proof that a humiliating 
transformation has passed on our planet since its 
birth. It lies within the bondage of corruption and 
under doom of death. To this impending doom the 
mighty solitudes of nature, the waving forests, the 
imperial mountains that enthrone the thunder, the 



268 Phil P. Neelys Sermons. 

rocky heights on whose rugged peaks the lightnings 
dance, and over valleys and plains where the angels 
have left their handwriting in the scattered, blush- 
ing flowers — all, all must submit; and our world 
itself is destined, when its fortunes are concluded 
and its revolutions ended, to be wrapped in its 
winding-sheet of flame and laid away in the char- 
nel-house of departed worlds. 

If we turn to the lower order of animals, we find 
that this law of decay and death is upon them also, 
and that to its authority they successively bow. 
The discoveries of geology show that an almost 
total change has passed on them since they were 
made subject to this law — a change of structure, 
size, etc. — in evidence of which are the fossils which 
have been disentombed from their primeval beds. 
What has been said of inanimate creation and of 
the brutes is also true of man, and when contem- 
plated in its application to him becomes instinc 
with a meaning the most appalling. Although de- 
scended from God and kindred with the angels — al- 
though thus royally fathered and highly allied — he 
too groans in this bondage of corruption and must 
die, wherever found and however conditioned. 

Of the true nature of the human body when it 
was first made the dwelling-place of the immortal 
we know but little. Man was then, as we think, 
exempt from all physical imperfection. He had 
been created in the image of God — had been pro- 
nounced "good;" and possessing as he did the at- 
tributes of an intellectual and moral nature, and 
these being unimpaired, we cannot conceive of him 



The Final Deliverance. 269 

in any other respect than as combining in his per- 
son all that was dignified in attitude, perfect in 
symmetry, beautiful in feature, and graceful in 
movement. His body, we believe, had none of the 
elements of decay, and was not susceptible of dis- 
organization ; or, if it was, he had access to that 
which could perpetuate life and render him phys- 
ically immortal. But when sin entered, death fol- 
lowed; so that for six thousand years death has 
been a visitation of organic necessity, as well as of 
punitive visitation — has been a part of his physiol- 
ogy. The tree of life has been guarded from mortal 
approach by "helmed seraphim and sworded cher- 
ubim," and death has mowed down its millions. 
Like a restless conqueror, he continues to "plunder 
earth of her families, rob time of his generations/' 
and to roll his car over the vanquished millions of 
our race. The very weakness of our bodies and 
the means we adopt for their preservation testify to 
this bondage. 

Why do we tax human ingenuity for means to 
mitigate the fatigue attendant on exertion; to 
quicken the tardiness of motion ; to postpone the 
imbecilities of age, and to assist the decaying 
senses? It is because we apprehend, and indeed 
painfully realize, the wear and tear which, the play 
of years is exerting on our frames. Why are our 
professional men driven to scientific researches, the 
object of which is the counteraction of human suf- 
fering superinduced by organic derangement? It 
is because disease is upon us, heralding the dark 
issues of this bondage. The ardor of the student 



270 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

in anatomy ; the zeal of the botanist in his experi- 
ments upon plants ; of the chemist in his analysis 
of minerals, and his torturings of nature; of the 
physician in prescribing careful regimen, etc. — are 
all so many proofs that man, restless under the ap- 
proach of this bondage, would lay contribution on 
matter and mind to delay its approach. Wherever 
the eye can turn it is met by memorials of this bond- 
age. The graves of affection and friendship lie thick 
around the habitations of the rich and the poor. The 
white tombs of our dead sleep in the still moonlight, 
and in their silence preach to us of our certain end. 

This congregation, with its remembered bereave- 
ments, the badges of mourning we see among you, 
the bleeding wounds that open afresh as memory 
wanders through the past — these things tell us that 
our stay here is short and uncertain ; that although 
the pulse may bound with life while I speak to you 
now, and the warm blood may leap healthily along 
its appointed channels at this moment, to-morrow 
it may be struck by the chill of death, and creeping 
languidly back to the heart settle there in stillness 
and stagnation forever. 

This doom hangs upon us all alike, nor can we 
fly beyond its certain execution. The High Chan- 
cellor of the skies has said, "Dust thou art, and 
unto dust shalt thou return," and no mortal plead- 
ing can cause its repeal. The summons will come, 
and although with the dying Altamont you may 
plead for an hour, a moment of time, yet to all 
your cries and shuddering agonies the Judge will 
be inexorable; for the chain of bondage is on you, 



The Final Deliverance. 271 

and you must wear it until the hour when unpity- 
ing destiny shall hurry you into the judgment pres- 
ence. Even now the clanking of that chain may 
be heard above the songs of pleasure and the voice 
of flattery by which your guilty soul is being de- 
ceived. It nestles amid the bright jewels with 
which you strive to gain the word of a poor 
ephemeral admiration. Neither the rosy hue of 
health nor an athletic frame and a vigorous consti- 
tution can give security against the approach of the 
dark destroyer. The active limb that bore you 
here, and the young heart so full of worldly happi- 
ness and so occupied with future hopes, will soon be 
rigid and cold. The countenance which now wears 
the tinge of health, and on which the flowers of 
youth and beauty bloom with dewy freshness, will 
soon wear the ashen paleness of the shroud, the cof- 
fin, and the tomb; and those flowers, now the source 
of a ruinous vanity and the pride of your circle of 
friendship, will be withered beside the grave's ban- 
queting worm. It may be — God of mercy enforce 
the thought upon the one of whom it may be true ! — 
it may be, we say, that already your tree of life has 
been riven by the hold of some mortal disease, and 
that the feebleness with which you push forward 
the enterprises of life and the languor wherewith 
you engage in the rounds of fashion tell to your 
frieuds that you are doomed; and yet, with strange 
infatuation, you banish every solemn thought from 
your mind, and persist in engrossing that mind with 
the vain show of the present. These premonitions 
of death, such as God in mercy sends to many in 



272 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

the form of slow decline, these are but the fadings 
of autumn before the certain blight of winter, the 
whispering winds that tell of the desolating tempest 
that only lingers that you may seek a place of shel- 
terage. The damp dew of the grave may be set- 
tling on your pale temples, the cold shadow whose 
touch is death may be circling around you in your 
folly, and before another message is borne to you 
"the harps of heaven may ask your hand, or the 
groans of the damned wail the dirge of your desti- 
ny." Strive as you may to shake off a sense of this 
bondage, it will be felt. " I must die" is a thought 
that meets us like an accusing ghost at every stage 
of the journey of life. It is an impression which 
nothing can remove. It comes amid the lights of 
the festal hall ; it floats in the melody of song; it 
mingles in the wild witchery of the dance; it 
comes — yes, it often comes — at the twilight hour, 
darkening with its shadows and murmuring to the 
thoughtful spirit exhortations to readiness; and 
amid the midnight hush its whispers of "It is ap- 
pointed unto man once to die, and after death the 
judgment," steals upon us slow and sad and sol- 
emn. 

2. A second circumstance in this picture of hu- 
miliation is the subjection of the creature unto 
vanity. "For the creature was made subject to 
vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who 
hath subjected the same in hope." We learn from 
this that the change which passed on the world 
was not by the concurrence of those who have lived 
since, but by Divine permission. Both the inani- 



The Final Deliverance. 273 

mate and animal creation were without will to 
choose, consequently the decay of the former as 
well as the mortality of the latter were submitted 
to, not willingly — that is, not with their desire or 
consent — but by reason of him who hath subjected 
the same. 

Now, some understand the pronoun him, in the 
text, as personating the great tempter, through 
whose seductions sin came into the world; others 
refer it to Him who was the victim of that tempt- 
er's policy ; while others still construe it as having 
allusion to God himself, who permitted that policy. 
Either of these interpretations could be allowed 
without violence to the instruction of the text. 
The great fact to be observed here is that the en- 
tire creation has been reduced to vanity ; that the 
curse of God hangs over it ; that death riots upon 
its loveliness as seen in the decay of its forests, the 
mortality of its animals, and the vain show in which 
its intelligences walk during their stay on earth. 
With them life is little better than Vanity Fair, 
luring its thousands on to sin and death. Were it 
even possible for the present to flow on in undis- 
turbed security, the fact that it must terminate, and 
that its termination may be unexpected, would en- 
velop all its pomp and magnificence with a hol- 
low mockery. The grave would still yawn before 
us, the baffler of our plans and the end of our 
mightiest purposes. We have only to look around 
us to be impressed with the fact that life in its 
most attractive form is but a vain show, and that 
man, as he walketh in it, vexeth himself in vain, 
18 



274 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

We behold on one hand the young, enraptured by 
visions born to vanish in an hour; on the other 
we see the mature, engaging in the present with 
an interest and an activity that would indicate a 
belief that this, and not the future, was the scene of 
their immortality. We see age itself tenaciously 
clinging to life, and battling with undiminished ar- 
dor amid its schemes of fortune and fame, urging: 
their way to success even while trembling on the 
verge of the grave. On every side we behold men 
merging their whole existence into time — reversing 
life and immortality — clinging to the husks of a 
bankrupt world, starving the immortal amid abun- 
dance, and striving to till the arms of the soul with 
shadows while God the Eternal is tendering them 
infinite supplies. 

Open your eyes upon the moving cavalcade — com- 
posed as it is of your most intimate associates, the 
members of your own household, in which you per- 
haps are mingling in self-satisfied and continued 
fatuity — and behold the vanity of your pursuits, the 
folly of your course, and, if possible, anticipate and 
prevent its incalculable misery. Some of you are 
engrossed with accumulation — sacrificing every 
thing that you may be rich ; others are drunk with 
ambition, and are panting in a reckless chase after 
the crown of fame ; and others still, to whom the 
day and home are alike vacant, but who when the 
night comes sally forth "to the empty pageant or 
the polluting revel, and with a zeal that shames 
worthier worshipers push their maddened avidity 
for dissipation into the blush and beam of the re- 



The Final Deliverance. 275 

turning day." In this way deluded thousands are 
expending the precious heritage of time, devoting 
it to the worship of the "gross and the sensual," 
and with an insanity whose end will be the mad- 
house of hell are sealing irretrievably and hope- 
lessly their eternal damnation. 

3. This leads us to the third view of the creation 
presented in the text — namely, that it is now un- 
dergoing the agony of an unfulfilled expectation. 
" For we know," says the apostle, " that the whole 
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
until now; and not only they, but ourselves also 
which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we 
ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the 
adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." 
Here the apostle, as if overpowered with the truth 
he would communicate, presses one of the loftiest 
figures of rhetoric into the effort to make known 
the wild and terrible anguish of a troubled cre- 
ation — its grandeur marred, its beauty impaired, 
and the dark tide of death coursing through all 
its arteries. Beholding it thus marred and ruined 
and dying, seeing it restless under the gleams 
of a high and shadowless day yet to dawn, he 
personifies it as in a state of agony, giving wild 
and fearful omens of some unrevealed mystery 
hanging over it, and destined to a future revela- 
tion, heaving and groaning under the strange 
portents of its approaching regeneration, and op- 
pressed with the agony of an unfulfilled expecta- 
tion ; " for the whole creation groaneth and trav- 
aileth in pain together." This personification is 



276 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

true. Our world is not at rest. The atmosphere 
through which it plows its way is impregnated with 
storm and fire. Its surface is disfigured, and its in- 
ternal machinery crazy. It wears an unhealthy hue, 
and its very breath generates disease and death. 
The flowery carpet, once honored by the foot-fall of 
angels and of God, now produces thorns and thistles 
and rude, disjointed rocks. This mighty material 
temple (apotheosized as it is in song) is but a mag- 
nificent wreck. Like a majestic ruin — on which 
winds have beaten, and whose arches have moldered 
beneath scorching suns, and along whose broken 
corridors the wild blasts of winter have been moan- 
ing piteously for centuries — she stands, monument- 
al both of her authorship and her decay. Her 
dreary wastes, the gloom of her unpeopled soli- 
tudes, the wintry hardness of her brow, her wild 
and fitful agitations, all tell that the play of her 
wheels has been interrupted, and that some myste- 
rious wrong affects her. "The whole creation 
groaneth." Her sighs are heard in the trembling 
zephyr of spring, her moans voice the autumn 
winds, her groans are howled in the storms of 
winter, while the jarring thunder blends its deep 
bass of agony in this mystic concert of woe. " The 
whole creation groaneth." From the path where 
the earthquake travels her voice comes sobbingly 
and mutteringly. We hear it in the wild anthem 
of the sea, in the weird-like wail of winter winds, 
in the "soft and soul-like sound" that steals from 
waving pines, while from a thousand volcanic 
mouths its agony is shrieked out to the overshad- 
owing heavens. 



The Final Deliverance. 277 

We need not dwell on the sufferings of the ani- 
mal and the rational parts of creation. The shades 
of this picture are too dark for portrayal. We 
talk of life as though it were a holiday — a festive 
march ; and so it may be with many, and so it is 
with all sometimes, perhaps; yet, after all, the 
world is full of misery. Every heart has its bitter- 
ness, and over each the shadow of suffering must 
fall. Even the smiles we see are half of them 
mockeries, covering broken or breaking spirits. 
We are born to pain, and we cannot escape it. It 
is ours by organic necessity. Pains of the body and 
pains of the mind — wearing the one to a shadow and 
depressing the other — will attend us. What agonies 
of doubt, what hidden grief, what wasting anguish, 
what silent suffering would be revealed if the se- 
crets of this assembly even could lie uncovered in 
this presence! — in proof too that the "whole crea- 
tion groaneth, and travaileth in pain together." 

4. But we learn from the text that this agony, this 
travailing, is in hope. " The earnest expectation of 
the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons 
of God." We read also in the text that the creat- 
ure has been subjected to all this travail of agony 
"in hope," and that the holiest, among whom was 
Paul, "waited for the adoption, to wit, the redemp- 
tion of the body," which expressions prove that "the 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in 
hope." How far there may be, as we think there 
is, an instinctive yearning or anticipation of future 
good felt among irrational animals we shall not 
pause to inquire, neither shall we speculate on the 



278 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

expectancy of enlargement that may be manifested 
in inanimate creation; but this much will we af- 
firm, that there are signs throughout the vegetable 
and animal and rational creation that each is in a 
transition state. The entire creation not only 
groans, but gives evidence of expectation. Like 
the insect, which, when verging* on the chrysalis, 
seeks to break away from its imprisonment that it 
may revel in beautiful expansion in the illuminat- 
ed atmosphere; so the world gives token of rest- 
lessness, as though it too would break away, and 
expanding into an illuminated palace float out in 
renewed luster and perfection. The earth, the grand 
old earth, though God-accursed, is God-expectant. 
Its very air-pulses and internal arteries throb with 
heat, as if they already heard the command for a 
new heavens and a new earth to spring forth from 
these ashes of desolation. Every thing betokens 
restlessness and change and hope. The sigh of 
the tempest, the flash of the meteor, the war of 
elements above and around us, the disquiet of man 
seen in the strife and care of life, the heated enter- 
prise, the fierce emulation, the battle-cry of con- 
tending armies, the havoc of death in the ranks of 
animated nature, and among successive generations 
of men, and above all that high instinct of worship 
rising from the temple of the soul wheresoever 
found — all are in proof not only of restlessness, but 
that "the earnest expectation of the creature wait- 
eth for the manifestation of the sons of God." 
This hope is not confined to latitude or color. It 
is felt everywhere; for all men, whatever be their 



The Final Deliverance. 279 

Religion or government, have a presentiment of fut- 
ure good, a belief that the present is a contracted 
sphere, one of bondage, and that a day of enlarge- 
ment and deliverance will yet come — a day too in 
which the visions that here steal out on the canvas 
of the soul shall pass before us crowded with august 
trains, and peopled with beautiful images, and dis- 
playing an amplitude of outline and a perfection of 
finish for which thought has no embodiment nor 
language expression. there is in every breast a 
mysterious yet powerful instinct that far away in 
the dim distance some beautiful isle slumbers in 
unbroken quiet, that its golden shores are in the 
keeping of angels, and that there, in that stormless 
haven and amid the glad welcomings of its pure 
tenantry, the storm-beaten bark of each faithful 
mariner may find rest and safety. It is an instinct 
of the soul, and lives through all time, and grows 
brighter as we enter the shades of the dark valley. 
We hear it in the gentle moonlight, and the sun 
writes it with his " whole round of rays." It is 
borne to us in the breath of morning, and we gather 
it from the crimson sunset. In the darkening 
twilight its voices whisper that the soul is to live 
when the light of watching stars overhead goes out 
in everlasting night; and when night comes with 
her trailing garments to our beds, she whispers the 
high vision to our souls: 

Thick clustering orbs, and this our fair domain, 
The tall, dark mountains and the deep-toned seas; 
All time, all nature, and all bounds, 
As one vast mystic instrument, are touched 
By an unseen, living hand ; 



280 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

and the song that rings round the world is that 
" when this earthly house of our tabernacle" goes 
down to dust we may have "a building, a house 
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Our 
agony here then is in hope; the bondage of those 
too who have gone to the grave is also in hope. 
We wait in hope for a manifestation of the sons of 
God ; and although where the light of the gospel 
does not shine this expectation may be crude and 
to us unsatisfactory; yet even there it is felt and 
acknowledged. The mythologies and religions of 
the Old World, and of dead ages, give proof of it. 
The Pantheon was crowded with its manifestations. 
The mutilated "marble brought from monuments of 
fallen idolatry, snatched from the waste of barbarism 
and time, and placed in the museums of Christen- 
dom in monitory collection with the wisdom of this 
world/ 7 furnish testimonj^ that an earnest expecta- 
tion of immortality inspired the hands that fashioned 
it. This testimony is offered also by the supersti- 
tious and religious vagaries of the Indians of the 
Few World. While the ancient pagan cherished 
the recollection of a golden age, of whose perfection 
their poets sung and of whose return their religious 
ceremonies indicated a belief, the savage sings of 
Elysian hunting-grounds thronged with game and 
lovely maidens, and placid streams and luscious 
fruits, where the Great Spirit is to welcome their 
departing braves at the close of life. These all 
prove to us that there floats before the eye of the 
world, even in its savage state, the brilliant pros- 
pective of a planet regenerated and smiling in the 



The Final Deliverance. 281 

light of heaven. Philosophy too has indulged this 
hope, and those too proud to confess themselves 
believers in revelation have given proof that they 
both believe in and are fascinated by this tran- 
scendent vision. Although they deny that religion 
has any thing to do with the philanthropic schemes 
they advocate, yet they contend that the end con- 
templated by their political and benevolent enter- 
prises is the bringing on a day of human perfectibil- 
ity radiant with beauty, and whose air is to be red- 
olent with the melody of a planet free from evil. 
What, w T e inquire, are they doing in all this but 
drawing pictures of immortality ? It is the voice 
of the soul, dissatisfied with the present and going 
out yearningly into the future for something better. 
While we have no confidence in those infidel spec- 
ulations on the perfectibility of human nature 
wherein economic theories are advocated as the 
basis on which to rear the prosperity of undecaying 
empires — speculations so popular among a certain 
class of infidel philosophers and sentimental littera- 
teurs in Europe — we say that while we have no confi- 
dence in their practicability, we regard them as giv- 
ing eloquent homage to the fact that men every- 
where are in expectation of a better state of things 
than the present, of some bright and beauteous 
evolution in the history of human affairs, the result 
of which they hope will be the splendors of that ra- 
diant free world so rhapsodized in German litera- 
ture and philosophy. 

"And not only they, but ourselves also, which 
have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves 



282 Phil. P. Neehfs Sermons. 

groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, 
to wit, the redemption of our body." Here the 
Christian, with all his spiritual wealth in this world, 
possessing as he does the fruits of the Spirit, even 
he is represented as groaning within himself, and 
waiting for some promised change. Although he 
has been regenerated, has received the first-fruits of 
the Spirit, has been partaker of heavenly graces, 
still under the weight of life's miseries and a pain- 
ful conviction of inward evil with which he has to 
wage a sore contest, and under a sense that the very 
graces he shares are only exotics for the full expan- 
sion of which life is insufficient — under the sad con- 
sciousness that here his best affections sometimes 
languish, that they are often chilled by contact with 
evil, that age and gathering infirmities will unfit 
him for enjoyment here, and that templed in the 
skies he will share a heightened rapture and a 
perfected bliss — under disabilities and feelings like 
these, he groans within himself in an agony of de- 
sire for a manifestation of the sons of God. Not 
that he is insensible as to the friendship of this life, 
the social ties that bind him to others, and those 
home-delights that give a charm to the present, 
yet his chart tells him of the general assembly and 
Church of the first-born, of the Elijahs that have 
ascended, of the holy and good who have entered 
before him, and he is fired with the prospect of be- 
coming part of their number. Memory too recalls 
the passage thither of many of his dearest friends, 
and some even from his own fireside; and as he 
thinks of their happy abode, the songs they sing, 



The Final Deliverance. 283 

the rapture they taste, the glory they share, and as 
faith images to his exultant soul the beautiful world 
in which they are so happ} r , with its enrapturing joy 
and unutterable bliss, he longs to escape and be at 
rest in the heaven of his Father and friends. In the 
wildness of his hope he cries: 

" I cannot, I cannot forbear 

These passionate longings for home; 
when will my spirit be there ! 
when will the messenger come ! " 

These longings of the soul will corne sometimes 
to every faithful Christian. He will groan for 
emancipation, having a desire to depart and be 
with Christ. Gazing out of the windows of his 
prison-house, he beholds the future all illuminated, 
gemmed with flashing stars of hope; and as their 
beams come quivering through the gloom of time, 
pillowing themselves on the bars of his prison, and 
even laying their soft light upon the very shadows 
that come trailing round his soul — ah! it is then 
that he cries out : 

"0 Jesus, in pity draw near, 

And lull me to sleep on thy breast ! 
Appear to my rescue, appear 
And gather me into thy rest! " 

It is this agony of hope, this unfulfilled expecta- 
tion, that characterizes the Christian. He groans 
within himself waiting for his adoption, to wit, the 
redemption of his body. That adoption is incom- 
plete until the trumpet sounds and the dead awake 
from their graves. In this hope he lives. In this 
hope he resigns the idols of his heart to the tomb, 



284 Phil. P. Neeh/s Sermons. 

knowing that the promise is that he shall again be 
permitted to fold them to his heart with no fear 
that death will ever part them again. In this hope 
he himself dies. He knows that Christ is risen — 
that his Redeemer lives, that his dust is to be in the 
keeping of that Redeemer, that the day is coming 
when under the Divine summons he and his kin- 
dred are to put off the mortal and stand forth in 
their resurrection-bodies, and that from thence 
death is to be swallowed up of life. 

II. But in the second place the text unfolds a 
general deliverance from all that sin has subjected 
us to. This opens to us a wide field, and we only 
regret that time will not allow us to give it more 
than a passing survey. Of this one thing, though, 
you may be assured — that the deliverance is coex- 
tensive with the bondage; for whatever of ruin sin 
wrought, thank God, the gospel can repair ! On 
this broad platform I plant myself, and with the 
word of the Lord before me, I will not be driven 
from it. 

God's Son came to redeem us, to retrieve the 
ruin which sin had caused, to restore all things — 
material, animal, and rational — to the glory of 
which they had been shorn ; to reopen the gates of 
the lost paradise, and to reinstate the whole creation 
in whatever transgression had robbed them of. En- 
tertaining this view of the restoration, we believe, 

1. That the redemption contemplates an entire 
remodeling of this planet. We have spoken of its 
inward convulsions, its stormy elements, its pale, 
autumn garlands, and of the manifold proofs of 



The Final Deliverance. 285 

some inward wrong which it gives ; and although it 
is reserved unto fire, yet through the redemption by 
Jesus it is destined at some period to be remodeled 
from its ashes of decay and enameled with beauty 
and hung with glory, to take its place among the 
stars and worlds of God, where it will roll on in 
beauty and brilliance forever. 

2. We believe that in this restoration the whole 
animal creation will. also share. They have suffered 
by sin, " not willingly, but by reason of Him who 
hath subjected '' us all; and we have confidence that 
the redeeming God will indemnify them in some 
way for whatever they may have lost by the fall. 

3. But the deliverance that most deeply concerns 
us is that in which believers, called in the text the 
sons of God, are to have part. These have been re- 
deemed, soul and body; and having accepted the ten- 
der of pardon, they are to share a fu 11, perfect, and eter- 
nal deliverance. Whatever of stain sin may have put 
upon the soul, the blood of the Crucified can remove 
it; and whatever of decay may come upon the body, 
the energy of the One who has redeemed us can 
triumph over its power. He can break the chain 
of death and free slumbering generations from the 
bondage of the grave. Into this bondage we must 
all descend. Our nearest friends, our kindred, our 
families — and not these only, but the entire line of 
humanity — must by organic necessity, and by Di- 
vine decree, go down into the tomb. We know too 
that it is a dreary bondage, that it is dark and lone- 
ly, that it is the prison of gloom, the land of silence, 
and that once there we are to be sundered from 



286 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

those high enchantments that make life so attract- 
ive to many. No sound of revelry breaks its still- 
ness, no lights relieve its darkness, no laughter is 
heard among that skeleton throng. No warrior 
shouts to his conquering legions, no orator sways 
that vast auditory. The sweets of flattery, the balm 
of friendship, and the power of love, are all unfelt 
there. Feeling and thought and motion, all are 
gone from the captives of the grave. The banquet- 
ing worm is their only companion as they slumber 
on from age to age. Life with them has ended; 
its pomp and circumstance are over, its gay pag- 
eant departed, its revel ended, and all that once 
tempted their ambition, or roused their activity, or 
kindled their hope, is as a forgotten dream to those 
who have gone down into this bondage. Silently 
thejr sleep beneath the circling heavens, unmindful 
of the storm and the sunshine that alternate in 
nature, and untroubled by the revolutions of time. 
And so have the prisoners been sleeping since the 
binding of the first captive, and so will it continue 
until the trumpet of doom shall summon them from 
their bondage. But the hour of their deliverance 
is coming. It is written, " Thy dead men shall 
live, together with my dead body shall they arise." 
"They shall not all sleep, they shall all be changed 
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last 
trump ; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead 
shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be 
changed." The word of the Lord is sure, and it 
has committed him to this deliverance. He has il- 
lustrated his power to deliver in his own resurrec- 



The Final Deliverance. 287 

tion. Symbols of it have been given in the transla- 
tion of Enoch and in the fire-chariot of Elijah sweep- 
ing over the bright hill-tops of glory and bearing 
body and soul to heaven. When Christ himself as- 
cended, the shout of the angel was that he would in 
like manner return when he comes to unlock the 
vaults of death, and collect his blood-bought treas- 
ures. He is our resurrection and life. His own im- 
perishable humanity brought back from the grave is 
the proof and pattern of ours. The battle-cry of the 
Christian warrior as he falls before his foe, with the 
red-cross shield gleaming above his dying head, is 
" Christ is risen!" This hope has made them un- 
conquerable even in death. It has converted death 
into a sleep on which the morning of deliverance 
is to break, and from which in that bright morning 
they are to come all glorious and divine, to enter 
upon a Sabbath and a rest whose song and shout 
are to be eternal. In this hope the believing dead 
of all ages slumber. 

God their Redeemer lives 

And ever from the skies, 
Looks down and watches all their dust, 

Till he shall bid it rise. 



And, 



Resting in this glorious hope, 

To be at last restored, 
Yield we too our bodies up 

To earthquake, plague, or sword ; 

List'ning for the call divine, 

The latest trumpet of the seven, 

Soon our soul and dust shall join, 
And both fly up to heaven. 



288 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

High on his azure throne sits our Deliverer, wait- 
ing for the hour of our "adoption, to wit, the re- 
demption of our body;" while on hill-side and 
valley, on the land and in the sea, beneath magnif- 
icent marble and in humble places, his saints await 
his summons; and soon, blessed be God, the rum- 
bling of his chariot- wheel 8 will be heard in the 
parting heavens, and then, amid the pealing blast 
of the trump of doom and the cry of the angel of 
destiny that there shall be time no longer, our De- 
liverer will come as he promised, and the dead 
shall arise. The solid marble shall rend, and the 
waves of the sea part, and amid the roll of mystic 
thunders and the sound of the judgment anthem, 
the shrieks of the wicked and the shouts of the 
righteous, amid the display of a pomp and ter- 
ror becoming the hour and the work, the earth 
and ocean will heave their dead millions into life, 
and the children of God, with bodies embellished 
with every beauty and made immortal, shall en- 
ter through the gates of that temple whose splen- 
dor surpasses the combined magnificence of all 
worlds. Then shall the world's harvest-home be 
sung. Then shall the discomfiture of hell be com- 
plete and the triumph of our Deliverer perfect. An 
enthralled world will have cast off its bonds, will 
have emerged from its prison, will have entered 
into the liberty of the sons of God. Then that man- 
ifestation of which the text speaks will have come. 
But of that liberty and manifestation who can speak 
adequately ? It will be a freedom from all sin, and 
a manifestation of all glory. The stain of passion 



The Final Deliverance. 289 

will be gone, the contest of evil will be done, the 
war of temptation will have ended, and the soul, 
purified in its affections, strengthened in its powers, 
and under the control of the Divine, shall then and 
forever wing its flight along the heaven of an infi- 
nite progression, knowing more and sharing an in- 
creasing rapture as it speeds its course along the 
ages of eternity. The shadows of time will be lost 
amid the manifested glory of the eternal, while the 
loftiest memory that will hold its place amid the 
apocalypse of that glory will be the memory of Cal- 
vary. All else will be lost, forgotten, as the soul 
rises from order to order, or ascends from height to 
height, or passes from blaze to blaze, in its infinite 
ascent; and thus it is to continue forever, knowing 
no abatement of zeal or decline of ardor. 

This is the deliverance promised us, and the lib- 
erty for which we pine. Even the hope of sharing 
it is almost too much to feel and live. What then 
will be the fruition we know not, but of one thing 
we are confident — that is, that to live in its anticipa- 
tion robs life of gloom, and that to die in sight of 
its unfolding visions takes from the grave its ter- 
rors. Living or dying, then, the Christian only is 
rich — rich in hope here and in assurance of an im- 
perishable heritage in the skies ! 
19 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 

" We spend our years as a tale that is told." Psalm xc. 9. 

WHAT is life but a succession of changes, 
which, in coming, make their impressions 
of joy or sadness, then fade in the distance and are 
finally forgotten? It is like "journeying through 
a hilly country where we often see only the objects 
close at hand," and where the connection of one 
part with another is shut out by the windings of the 
road over hills and across ravines and through thick 
forests. In these journeyings the traveler now and 
then comes to an open summit which seems as a 
watch-tower lifted up over all the region, and as he 
pauses there much of the ground over which he has 
passed breaks upon the eye at one view, and much 
of that which is before opens on his vision. It is 
thus that we journey through life, occupied mainly 
with single hours and single days, which bring with 
them their individual labors and cares, their suc- 
cesses and reverses, their joys and sorrows; and 
these one by one give place to others, and are lost 
sight of in the intricate windings of the way. Still 
we are journeying, forever journeying — forever 
passing from one period of time, and forever enter- 
ing upon another, with hearts forever palpitating 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 291 

with various emotions, with sadness for the past, 
anxiety for the present, or hope for the future, and 
at rare intervals only gathering lessons of wisdom 
from the experiences that are gone. We fail to 
note them down, to call them up, to consider the 
relation of one thing to another — of this day or 
hour to the one that is gone — and by our very 
carelessness lose many a valuable lesson which the 
passing years might teach us. As one may care- 
lessly read a book and fail to gather half its mean- 
ing, or glance at a picture and perceive not half its 
beauty, or part from a traveling acquaintance with 
but little kuowledge of him, so may we, by our in- 
attention to the periods and events of life, fail to be- 
come wiser and better as the years of our pilgrimage 
glide noiselessly on. We glance off" from events 
before we realize their meaning. We hasten on to 
new things without reading yet more valuable les- 
sons in the old. We live too fast, and as a conse- 
quence most of us fail to live wisely. 

!N"ear the closing hours of the week just gone, if 
you had looked in upon one of the happy homes of 
your city, you might have seen, perhaps, a rosy 
child seated at his mother's feet, and with loving, 
wondering eyes and hungering ears listening to a 
a story she was telling him. With what interest 
he hangs upon her words, and how eagerly he enters 
into every detail until the story is done and the 
mother's voice is hushed ! And then ho w he gazes 
into the pictured embers, seeing all manner of fan- 
tastic figures and changing forms upon the opening 
and shutting face of the red coals and the gray ash- 



292 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

es, until at last the eye sinks, the head nods, and the 
drooping little sleeper is borne off safe to bed ! The 
night passes, and the little fellow is soon occupied 
with the events of the new morning. He has a 
vague remembrance of the sweet excitement of the 
last evening, but the wild fancies it brought are 
soon swept away. They grow dimmer and dimmer 
in the mind, until at last they lie there as films of 
spider-web float with long threads glistening in the 
summer air. It is just in this way that we, who 
have passed from childhood, "spend our years as a 
tale that is told." We remember these passing pe- 
riods, crowded as they are with incident aud inter- 
est and responsibility, full as they are with events 
which at the time burden the heart with agony 
or expand it with happiness — we remember them, 
we say, vaguely, dreamily, and too often without 
improvement. The heat and glow of the present 
are quenched when the present becomes the past. 
Days come in with form and sound and motion 
like the coming in of crested waves; like them, 
they break upon the shore of the present. They 
cover it with millions of sparkling, evanescent 
gems. These dissolve and recede with the flowing 
tide, and are lost again in the black depths, while 
new days, like new waves, foam and sparkle, and 
break and die away, as others did. 

These divisions of time, as they come to us, have 
individuality; but as they depart that individuality 
is lost in the great aggregation of the past, and the 
receding years seem to us but a part of the ocean of 
time, which has been widening since time began. 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 293 

My friends, we stand now on one of those eleva- 
tions which the traveler sometimes climbs in his 
journey, and which, as we said, serves as a watch- 
tower from which he can survey the ground he has 
gone over and glance at what is before him. Some 
of us, like him, may be weary and sad — far from our 
home and with longings to reach it, that we may rest. 
Therefore, let us pause in our journey and from this 
eminence — this dividing Sabbath between the year 
that is departing and the year now struggling into 
birth — call up the past, with its sunshine and shadow, 
and turn our eyes courageously and hopefully upon 
the future as it opens to us from this point of vision. 
Let us pass the events that have occurred in solemn 
review in our thoughts, and pour upon them the 
light of sober reflection, and let us hail those which 
are coming as soldiers welcome conflicts which 
when successfully encountered will end the strife 
and hurry them home. 

We are too apt, while looking forward to the 
close of our history, to neglect to look back and 
perceive that our history, so far, has been a series 
of closings — that the past is heaped up and crowd- 
ed full of things which are finished, are ended for- 
ever. We forget that all the periods of time, all the 
days and years that are in the past, are as effect- 
ually ended, to us, as they will be at God's last 
day when the angel shall lift up his hand and 
swear by Him thatliveth forever and ever that time 
shall be no more. They are not only ended in 
point of time and fact and privilege, but most of 
their events are ended in point of memory, especial- 



294 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

]y those that lie far back amid the rubbish of the 
far-away years. How many of us here can remem- 
ber and recite the events and occurrences of the first 
five }^ears of our lives? To most persons there is 
scarcely a remembrance left of that period. Pass 
on through the next five years, and how much can 
you reproduce? Here and there an event may 
stand out visible and clearly defined, but the years, 
the long passing } T ears, have rolled away and per- 
ished, as did the clouds of summer. As in books 
there are at the beginning and ending blank leaves, 
so ordinarily in human life there are years at the 
opening and close on which nothing is written. 
They have no record, no mark; they are blank. 
And even when we pass into childhood — the sea- 
son of romp and grow r th and exhilaration — the 
years become huddled together, and we can neither 
thread them nor paint them from memory. They 
heap themselves up in masses, and at thirty we look 
back upon twenty years as if they were but a hand- 
breadth. At that time how quickly year seems to 
follow year! They come and grow and orb to the 
full, and wane and die and are gone like shadows. 
It is so even with those years which while pass- 
ing seemed to us an eternity — those years whose 
marks of suffering we will carry with us forever. 
Even those dissolved and passed away at last like 
drops of dew, and are now lost to us and unseen 
by us as they lie bedded in the ocean of eternity. 
My friends, these periods are gone — all gone. One 
by one they have left you; and while they have 
been passing, furrows have been forming and hairs 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 295 

have been whitening and infirmities gathering. Go 
to the shore of that ocean into which they have been 
emptied, and call them. They were full of voices 
while passing, but they are silent now. Their pe- 
riod is passed and their record finished, and there 
they lie in their silent graves to meet you in the 
resurrection morn. 

We think it a solemn thing to look forward to 
that time when we shall stand on the last brink of 
life and gaze back upon our buried years ; but it is 
even more solemn, if you would but believe it, for 
you to stand in the freshness of youth, or in middle- 
life, and look back upon what years are gone, for 
they are registered and judged; and not when God's 
judgment dawns will that judgment be more irrev- 
ocable with many of you than it now is. 

In life it is only the nearer hours that report 
themselves. As we pass on through the year, only 
days instead of hours are remembered. As we 
journey onward, days lapse into weeks, and these 
range themselves in lines whose continuity is 
measured by no prominent object. At length only 
years can be seen, and at last not even these in 
their individuality. For, as sailors when they 
leave the harbor carry with them for awhile the 
sight of shore, but who as they sail on lose first 
the low water-lines and then the higher masses, 
having nothing left at last to fi.x the eye on but 
some height rising far above the sea, and which 
after the night is passed is hidden by the bend of 
the earth's surface, so, my friends, even those years 
which stand out on the shores of the past like some 



296 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

towering Teneriffe are finally shut out from our 
memory as we sail on toward the eternal shore. 
Ah, how true is it of us all that "we spend our 
years as a tale that is told!" 

Go back with me now, and see how much you 
can remember. Be a child again, and call up the 
past. Take your place in the old homestead, and 
tell me what faces are fresh in your memory, and 
how many of the ten thousand events and scenes 
that were full of interest to you then can now be 
vividly recalled. Who were your kindred? Who 
were your visitors then? Who were your neigh- 
bors? Who were your playmates? What circum- 
stances marked the history of your neighborhood? 
These things were all known to you then, they in- 
terested you, they were vivid realities to you, 
when a child; but what are they now but dimly 
remembered marks on the canvas of the past? 
And now pass on to your school-days, and tell me 
who learned their letters with you ? Who were 
your teachers? Who sat on your right, who on 
your left? What were the events that marked 
your history then ? Who among your school-mates 
was most frequently punished, and who escaped? 
Who was in the first class, who in the second and 
third ? These are things which were important to 
you then — as important then as the fall of Mobile 
and the surrender of the South was to you last 
spring — and yet how little do you remember of 
them all? Go back now to the church you attend- 
ed when a child, and who of its old men and wom- 
en, who have long since entered upon their rest, 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 297 

can you reproduce? How many of the young peo- 
ple who sat by your side do you remember? What 
can you recall of the minister — of his sermons, of 
the Sabbath-school, of its teachers and scholars, of 
the old grave-yard where you went when a child 
and saw a little brother or sister buried? And so 
I might go on, tracing step by step your entrance 
upon life — your early battles for fame or wealth, 
and the struggles and bright, golden hopes of your 
manhood. These are all passed, and are remem- 
bered now " as a tale that is told." 

And what shall we say of the unwritten dreams, 
the unfulfilled longings, the high- wrought reveries, 
the towering castles in the clouds which we have 
all felt and built and forgotten ? This part — and to 
the young soul it is a beautiful part — this part of 
your life is gone too, all gone. One has touching- 
ly said, in illustration of this, that "birds gathered 
for flight in autumn, and flying toward equatorial 
summer, often chance in their course to drop a 
feather from the wing which carries them through 
the air — a feather brilliant in color and curved like a 
bow, and which, wavering and swaying, falls into 
some thicket, while they flock on. After awhile the 
winter is past, the season changes, and they bend 
their course northward again. They pass the same 
spot where the spent feather lies, and do not see it. 
It is lost and hidden forever." And so with our 
youthful fancies, which carried us far above human 
life and reality. They, like the downy feather from 
the wing, are lost and forgotten. As a tale that is 
told fades from the mind, so these untold traceries 



298 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

of thought, these airy evolutions of an inarticulate 
fancy, pass from us and are remembered no more. 
Where too are the admirations which in early life 
were to us living realities — the hero-worship that 
first stirred our souls ? Where is the record of those 
wonders that so moved us then? those excitements 
which broke the level of life, and on which we fed 
for years? those events which then filled all the 
wide horizon of our hopes, and which roused up 
our passions as with the blast of a trumpet? The 
number of these we cannot recount, but alas! how 
many of them remain with us now ? Where too are 
our great experiences — those towering hill-tops of 
gladness or sadness on which we once stood, and 
which we then thought would always be as clearly 
defined as in that moment of joyous or sorrowful 
realization? Alas, only a few of these are left to 
us now ! As one who goes forth from a populous 
town often looks back and sees it growing smaller 
and smaller as he travels on — its houses fading and 
its broad streets and great palaces constantly 
lessening, until after awhile he can see only a 
long spire leaning out against the gray sky — so 
we, as we journey on in life, lose sight of much 
which was once great and important to us, and 
find at last that of all the experiences we shared, 
as we journeyed on, there remains but one or 
two visible to the eye of memory. The rest are 
all moldering in silence, and are forgotten as a tale 
that is told. 

We should remember, though, that however much 
of the past may have perished from our thoughts, 



Life Spent as a Tale that is Told. 299 

we are still building our lives with the very same 
materials, as to kind, which we used in the time 
that is gone. In this respect we change but little, 
and it is this that makes it possible for us to learn 
wisdom from experience. The same rising and 
falling emotions; the same flow of endless thought; 
the same succession of events arresting the atten- 
tion and occupying the feelings; the same endeav- 
ors for happiness; the same failures and successes, 
each with its train of pain or joy, and each so im- 
portant as to make us think at the time that it can 
never be forgotten; the same discipline, with its 
heart-aches and agonies, to which the wise Father 
has always subjected his children — these are the 
materials out of which the past was built, and 
from which only can we ever build. 

Only one day, with its hours and minutes and mo- 
ments, remains. The next sun but one will rise and 
shine on the glad new year. It only remains for us to 
turn and bid farewell to the past. And now, farewell 
to its cares and burdens and troubles! Farewell 
to its fears and hopes and griefs ! Farewell to its 
yearnings, its aspirations, and its struggles! They 
are gone, they are with the past. Farewell to many 
who started with us in the dawn of this year but 
who left us ere it closed — to the companion who 
was to some of you as an angel of God, but who 
to-night is an angel with God; to the babe that was 
yours, but who to-night is God's, and therefore 
more than ever yours, though beyond the reach of 
your arms, for the heart tends it yet and cradles 
it more lovingly than ever. Farewell to our 



300 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

Christian brethren who have heard the trumpet 
before us and gone forward ! Farewell to all ! 
year, thy march is ending ! Thy work is done ! 
Pass from us, for we shall see thee no more until, 
reascending, we shall behold thy record in the all- 
judging day! 



Masonic Address. 



IK consenting to serve as your organ of commu- 
nication with the outside world on this day of 
Masonic memories, I confess to a feeling of embar- 
rassment under the task assigned me. To tell this 
multitude of the rise and progress and fortunes of 
our order would be to repeat a story which has 
formed the staple of most of the addresses to which 
they have listened, and would therefore fail to in- 
terest or profit them. These anniversary occasions, 
with their pomp and insignia, are not intended as 
mere festivals, but as days when a great brotherhood 
comes forth from lodge and chapter and council 
and commaudery to bear witness to the worth and 
value of its principles as a great humanitarian insti- 
tution. This is the responsible service you have 
imposed on me to-day; and now to this task I shall 
proceed at once to address myself. 

The organization, one of whose festivals we cele- 
brate to-day, is eminently social in its constitution 
and operations; and we live in an age in which the 
social principle is being profoundly studied. Men 
are examining it not as an abstraction, but as a 
means for diffusing ideas and principles, and for the 
propagation and triumph of political, social, and 



302 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

religious theories and enterprises. It is upon this 
principle of association that our organization is at- 
tempting to carry out its purposes. It is a princi- 
ple powerful for good or evil just as those who em- 
ploy it may direct ; and since candor compels this 
admission, we know not that we can better serve 
the cause of truth to-day than by fairly and honest- 
ly inquiring into this law of association, and ascer- 
taining its uses and abuses so that these spectators 
who have come to take part in our festival may see 
how far Masonry is employing it for good. It is a 
principle whose foundations are laid in the wants of 
our race. Man is naturally weak and infirm, ig- 
norant and evil. In addition to physical frailty, his 
mind is forced in by barriers over which, however 
intensely he may struggle, he cannot pass, while his 
moral nature is hung about with gloom and dark- 
ness. He is a prisoner, in bondage to evil, having 
a dim and disquieting apprehension of better things 
to come, yet held back by powerfully operating 
forces from their attainment. He realizes that life 
is made up of stern duties and hard tasks, and 
wrapping courage around him as a garment, he dares 
the conflict to which these invite; but alas! how 
often is he driven back, sorely wounded and some- 
times despairing ! Thus baffled and discouraged, he 
needs the sympathy of some other warm and suffer- 
ing heart; and when two such hearts meet and min- 
gle their mutual sorrows and struggles and hopes, 
their strength of endurance is doubled by the asso- 
ciation. When men come together in this way, 
they soon learn that a concentration of powers and 



Masonic Address. 303 

a union of energies give efficiency to their enter- 
prises and success to their plans, on the principle 
that two can do jointly what two could not do sin- 
gly. Therefore, they form a bond in which they 
pledge conjoint exertion and mutual aid and sym- 
pathy. In this now we have illustrated the princi- 
ple of association in its necessity and operations. 

Take man separately, and he is among the weak- 
est and most dependent of all God's creatures, but 
bind men together and they become invincible. 
They gain a mastery over nature, and are seen 
building pyramids, rearing temples, tunneling 
mountains, diking oceans, extending their domin- 
ion over sea and land, and making the universe it- 
self, in a secondary sense, subordinate to their au- 
thority. 

Our first entrance upon life and the necessary 
surroundings of childhood show that this law of 
social influence is of Divine ordination. The infant 
takes its place not in solitude, but in the family 
circle; and children, if left alone and to themselves, 
would perish through ignorance and helplessness. 
Therefore, the perpetuation of our race depends 
upon this divinely ordained law. Obedience to it 
is the secret of all progress, through manhood and 
through the ages, because men not only become 
more powerful by association but more intensified. 
It warms them into earnestness; it wakes up forces 
that were slumbering and unknown ; it kindles en- 
thusiasm; it fires the torpid soul with life, and es- 
tablishes an electric communication between those 
whom it brings together and pledges to a common 



304 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

work and purpose. Separate a man from human 
sympathy, doom him to solitude, shut him out from 
society where no human voice can speak to him 
nor human eye look upon him, and he is without 
energy — is only a breathing clod of earth, whose 
highest intellectual exercise would be reverie. 
Exile him from his kind, and no matter how green 
the earth, or beautiful the heavens, or magnificent 
the psalm sung by nature, in which storm and 
wind and breathing flowers take part — no matter 
what sublime appeals nature may make, nor what 
words of lofty cheer may break upon him from the 
grand universe — he will relapse into utter insensi- 
bility to all the beauty and grandeur around him ; 
or if in some degree he should be alive to these, 
his highest realm of survey will be the shadowy 
and unsubstantial land of dream and fancy. In 
addition to this intensifying influence which the law 
of association exerts, it is eminently creative also; 
and in this is seen its greatest practical worth when 
wisely directed. It not only "brings to a point 
forces which existed before, and which were inef- 
fectual because separated, but by the feeling and 
interest which it rouses it becomes a creative prin- 
ciple. It calls forth new forces, and gives even the 
individual mind a consciousness of powers which 
would otherwise have been unknown." The mind 
in this way sees what union has accomplished, and 
gains confidence and hope. It awakes to a recog- 
nition of its own greatness, and to something like 
a proper estimate of its possibilities. It beholds its 
native dignity and the true measure of its strength. 



Masonic Address. 305 

The results of united effort stand forth as an illus- 
tration of its wonderful capabilities, and as a proph- 
ecy of grander things to come. It becomes sub- 
limely confident, and is prompted to enter upon 
still mightier achievements with an unwavering be- 
lief that success is possible. In attempting these, 
unknown forces are developed, mightier energies 
are sprung, and by that reciprocal action of mind 
on mind which the practical workings of this law 
of association keeps up, and that interchange of 
thought which it makes necessary, capacities are 
discovered which were never dreamed of by man 
in his individual character. This is the secret 
spring in the great work of progress. It is the mo- 
tive-power in that wondrous machinery so marvel- 
ously at work in this nineteenth century, and it 
gives promise of that happy time to come when 
one law will bind all nations and tongues and 
kindred of the earth in the bonds of universal 
brotherhood. 

The law of association, though, however powerful 
for good, is equally so for evil ; and hence every 
society should be rigidly scrutinized before it is ad- 
mitted to popular favor. If its principles are open 
to inspection they should be fairly and honestly 
canvassed; or if these principles are veiled in se- 
crecy and symbolized by ceremonies, then the ten- 
dencies of such organizations should be carefully, 
untiringly watched, for " by their fruits ye shall 
know them." 

An association such as ours is simply society 
consolidated or systematized with a view to certain 
20 



306 Phil. P. Neely's Sermons. 

ends. Now then, however the internal police of 
such a society may be for good and sufficient rea- 
sons concealed from the public, that public has a 
right to know the ends contemplated by it; other- 
wise the society arrays itself, by implication at least, 
against that public. Wherever there is a studied 
concealment of these ends ground is given for sus- 
picion. The uninitiated, ignorant not only of the 
signs and pass-words to the inner temple, but of the 
designs of those who have entered, know not but 
that their peace, their liberty, and the very safety of 
their homes, may be in jeopardy. Hence we take 
the position that while social organizations may 
find it necessary to adopt a ceremonial known only 
to the initiated, they have no social right to conceal 
the end in view or the purpose contemplated. The 
world — the outside world — has a right to know 
what they are after; and to refuse this knowledge 
is to furnish that outside world with a good reason 
for regarding such associations in the light of ene- 
mies. But even when the object of a secret society 
is made public, and is acknowledged to be praise- 
worthy, the value of such a society will depend very 
much upon its influence on those constituting it. 
If under a mistaken view of man as an individ- 
ual it should so associate him with others as to de- 
stroy or weaken the force by which he acts on him- 
self, the tendency of such an alliance will be to 
work incalculable mischief upon its members. 
Every man's personality should be held sacred, and 
any alliance with another, or with others, that dims 
its recognition, that makes him the creature of an- 



Masonic Address. 307 

other, that silences those intuitions which belong 
to the individual soul, and which are divinely im- 
planted voices, whereunto every man should listen 
as unto the voice of God — any alliance, we say, that 
does this must inevitably retard individual develop- 
ment. Therefore, if the animus of an association be 
such as will transform him from the independent, 
self-determining representative of the being that 
made him into a mere mechanized automaton — a 
simple adjunct to another or toothers, a cipher be- 
side a numeral — then do we say of that association 
that it is destroying in that man what he should 
hold inviolate, his sacred personality; that instead 
of opening it is by perversion drying up the fount- 
ains which would otherwise pour streams of un- 
measured happiness around him. 

The social element becomes valuable in propor- 
tion as it aids in the development of the creative 
forces in the individual. This is true of all society. 
It will always be found tributary to individual hap- 
piness and to general progress when it places us in 
situations where we may wisely expend these forces, 
and when it furnishes materials on which they may 
be exerted, thus opening the way for each individu- 
al to be blessed by, and to be a blessing to, the soci- 
ety with which he is identified. 

It should never be forgotten that while all men 
have a common humanity, that humanity has 
been cast in molds of infinite diversity as to our 
physical, moral, and intellectual organization ; and 
that true happiness is to be found and God honored 



308 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

by each man advancing according to his individual 
mold and in his individual sphere; and that it should 
therefore be the aim of every man to be himself. 
He should recognize the fact that God has given 
him a distinct personality to be built up and im- 
proved by an individual outgrowth, for which per- 
haps the whole line of humanity may not be able 
to furnish him an exact model. Whenever the so- 
cial principle loses sight of this, it becomes hurtful 
to the individual. 

And now, take society, fashionable society — or, 
if you please, the general social system as adopt- 
ed among us, and as we stand related to it — and 
what is it but a perversion of the principle we 
have enunciated? What is it in many places and 
with many persons but stereotyped hypocrisy, cast- 
iron insincerity, or India-rubber accommodative- 
ness? Who dare be himself in society? Who dare 
speak out there only such words as the heart puts 
upon the lips? Who has forbearance, enough and 
humility enough to hear such words? For want of 
this courage and this forbearance the coin of insin- 
cerity is current everywhere in society — in our 
great fashionable centers, in our drawing-rooms 
and parlors, and haunts of assembled elegance. 
Men and women study it as they would some noble 
science; they gather up its phrases and store away 
its smiles and accent in memory, as some gather 
wealth ; they rehearse its attitudes of body and in- 
tonations of voice in private, that they may wear 
the seeming of naturalness in public. for some 
delivering Hercules to shatter the chains by which 



Masonic Address. 309 

American society is being bound to the Promethean 
rock of foreign fashion ! O for the native manhood 
and womanhood, the sublime dignity, the grand 
simplicity, of our earliest American ancestry ! We 
need a self-respect which would free us as a people 
from the pressure of that boa-constrictor of fashion 
by whose slow and stealthy convolutions the nobili- 
ty of our self-hood is being crushed out. We need a 
self-respect that would perpetuate the lineaments of 
a national personality of which every American 
citizen should be proud, but which many seem 
anxious to efface in their blind devotion to every 
thing bearing a transatlantic imprint and a foreign 
stamp. 

In what we have said now we wish to be perfect- 
ly understood. We hold that the social principle, 
whether considered in reference to society in gen- 
eral or to those associations of which we have spok- 
en as society consolidated for the promotion of partic- 
ular ends, has in it the elements of an immeasurable 
good or of an immeasurable evil, j ust as its ends may 
be worthy and as its operations may leave the indi- 
vidual an untrammeled worker or otherwise. We 
hold that whenever society, as we have defined 
it, sinks the individual in the mass; whenever it 
robs the soul of its birthright, its independence, its 
personality, and inaugurates a system of social, in- 
tellectual, or moral Helotism, by which that person- 
ality is made to wear a chain more galling and de- 
basing than Roman conqueror ever put upon sub- 
jugated vassal ; when the social principle does this, 



310 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

we say, it works evil and only evil, both to the in- 
dividual and the body. 

A great moralist once said, and it is a truth we 
need to feel most deeply in this susceptible age, 
that "our connection with society, while it is 
our greatest aid, is also our greatest peril." We 
are in constant danger of being molded by foreign 
instead of native influences, of becoming negative 
instead of positive characters, and of losing from 
the soul that creative and self-forming energy so 
necessary in working out our improvement. We 
are in danger, from the law of association, of substi- 
tuting the consciences of others for our own — of 
paralyzing our own faculties by depending on oth- 
ers as guides — of being molded from abroad instead 
of from within. The pressure of society upon the 
individual is constant, accumulative, and immeas- 
urable. Sometimes it is open and direct, and comes 
in the form of authority; at other times it is subtle 
and silent, and comes in the guise of blandishment 
and promise. No matter how it comes, its influ- 
ence is beyond calculation. What mighty power is 
lodged in a frown or a smile, in the voice of praise 
and flattery, in scorn or neglect, in public opinion, 
in domestic habits and prejudices, in the spirit and 
state of the community to which we belong? As 
the same moralist has said, "there is nothing that 
escapes the cognizance," and it may be added "the 
influence," of society. Its legislation extends even 
to our dress, our movements, and our features; and 
as we have intimated, the individual bears the 



Masonic Address. 311 

traces, even in countenance, attitude, air, and voice, 
of the social influences amidst which he has been 
plunged. 

We may all boast of our independence, yet we 
are all nevertheless in danger of growing up slaves to 
this exacting, arbitrary sovereign — of forgetting, or 
never learning, our true responsibility; of living in 
unconsciousness of that divine power with which 
we are invested over ourselves, and in which all the 
dignity of our nature is concentered; of overlooking 
the sacredness of our minds, and laying them open 
to impressions from any and all who surround us. 
We believe that virtue lies in individual action, in 
inward energy, in self-determination ; that the soul 
under the divine promptings must act from an in- 
ward spring. Even the good as well as the bad 
may injure us, if through that intolerance which is 
a common infirmity of the good they impose upon 
us authoritatively their own convictions, and ob- 
struct our intellectual and moral activity. We be- 
lieve that nothing morally good or great springs 
from mere sympathy and imitation. These princi- 
ples will only forge chains for us and perpetuate 
our infancy, unless more and more controlled and 
subdued by that inward lawgiver and judge whose 
authority is from God, and whose sway over our 
whole nature can alone secure its free, glorious, 
and everlasting expansion. 

Our greatest and most difficult duty as social be- 
ings is to derive constant aid from society in any 
of its forms without taking upon our necks its 
yoke; to open our minds to the thoughts, reason- 



312 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

ings, and persuasions of others, and jet to hold fast 
to the sacred right of private judgment; to receive 
impulses from our fellow-beings, and yet to act from 
our own souls; to sympathize with others, and yet 
to determine our own feelings; to act with others, 
and yet to follow our own consciences ; to unite so- 
cial deference and self-dominion ; to join moral self- 
subsistence with social dependence; to respect oth- 
ers without losing our own self-respect^ to love our 
friends and reverence our superiors, and yet give 
our supreme homage to that moral perfection which 
no friend and no superior has realized, and which, 
if faithfully pursued, will often demand separation 
from all around us. The duty and difficulty of 
doing this every man must admit; and that society 
whose practical operations instead of hindering 
give aid to this undertaking commends itself to the 
world as an organized agency for human develop- 
ment. 

The venerable order for which I stand here to- 
day as the appointed organ, in addition to its great 
object, which is benevolence, is by its nature and con- 
stitution an eminent auxiliary to man in this work of 
individual development and improvement. It is an 
association of men differing as widely perhaps as it 
is possible for men to differ, in religion, in politics, 
in social position, and in pursuits. The largest lat- 
itude is given to individual opinions and convic- 
tions, and therefore individual development is un- 
trammeled. In fact, this very diversity gives aid 
to development. Masonry is one everywhere and 
among all nations. It brings nations and sections 



Masonic Address. 313 

and communities and individuals into a unity of 
freedom as to opinions. These widely separated 
elements, when brought together in that harmony 
and brotherly love which is the boast of Masonry, 
act on one another with a new power, and the result 
is that these differing and often hostile influences 
balance or neutralize one another, and almost com- 
pel the intellect to act, to compare, to judge, and to 
frame itself into order and harmony. Now, when 
men are brought together, as Masonry brings them — 
representing every variety of institutions, education, 
climate, temperament, religion, and history — who 
does not see that it furnishes an opportunity for 
our common nature to take form under the influ- 
ence of every variety of help ? The intellectual in- 
tercourse is enlarged, and the individual mind is 
quickened in proportion. It places us in communi- 
cation with innumerable and diversified social influ- 
ences, takes us out of the narrow circle of a neighbor- 
hood or church or community — in fact, makes us 
fellow-citizens with the friends of truth and broth- 
erly love under the whole heaven; and by means of 
the very hostile influences thus brought together in 
harmony we gather aid and encouragement to that 
independent moral judgment and intellectual dis- 
crimination by which our individual views are 
more purified and enlarged. 

While this, in brief, illustrates the constitution 
and practical workings of Masonry, we would but 
imperfectly perform the duty of the hour were we 
not to call attention to the end contemplated by 
this association. It seeks to advance no social, 



314 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

political, or religious theory. These questions are 
left to the individual mind and conscience; all that 
is required of the candidate who kneels at her ven- 
erable altars is faith in God and love for his fellow- 
man. No man who denies the being of a God and 
is not in earnest sympathy with man, as the off- 
spring of God and as the child of sin and suffering, 
can be a Mason. This sympathy is the great life- 
artery of Masonry, and runs through its entire anat- 
omy, from entered apprentice with his symbolic 
lambskin to the gallant knight with helmet and 
plume and sword. 

Our order recognizes in man's nature — sinful and 
erring and sorrowing as it is, fallen and degraded 
and wretched as it ma} r be — a similitude of the di- 
vine; and it pledges the sympathy of each Mason's 
heart and the strength of his arm in the godlike 
work of lifting that nature from the depths of its 
pollution and misery and restoring it to social pu- 
rity and happiness. The foundations of all success- 
ful efforts for man's social and moral redemption 
must be laid in a profound reverence for his nature 
and a belief in the possibility of his restoration; and 
unfortunately for our world, there is too little of 
this reverence and faith everywhere. They are ig- 
nored too much in our business relations and habits, 
in our general social life, and even in our religion. 
We undervalue this nature, we are too skeptical on 
the subject of human goodness, we indulge in mu- 
tual distrust; we see man in his wreck and ruin, 
and we lose sight of the hopeful fact that in that 
ruin are germs of an immeasurable grandeur which 



Masonic Address. 315 

appeal for help, and whose very appeals prove their 
worthiness to receive help. We forget that in that 
rubbish shines the symbol of divinity ; that though 
the shrine may be shattered and the altar broken, 
the godlike is still there, crying to the creative word 
for assistance, and that in response to that wild lit- 
any of agony, every brother's heart should throb 
with sympathy and every brother's hand be out- 
stretched to aid. And my brothers, not until 
we, whose very symbols are the lights which flash 
out the revelations of this reverence and faith, make 
our practice conform more entirely to our profes- 
sion in this respect can we see Masonry triumphant- 
ly vindicating her pretensions before the bar of the 
world. And that we may do this the more effect- 
ually, let each one of us turn the eye within and 
learn our own immortality and its value, for in 
your nature and mine we shall behold types of all 
humanity. Sound this nature then, if you would 
know fully its grandeur. Question the dark sibyl 
if you would hear responses that will awe you into 
reverence. Know yourself if you would know and 
reverence and love your brother and be to him a 
benediction. 

when in those high moments of faith, of hope, 
and of purpose, which come to us all perhaps, I 
think of the soul with its vast capabilities, its won- 
drous creative power, its yearning after good, its 
longings for that home which is more beautiful 
than the isles of the evening land, which is lovelier 
than cloud-palaces glimmering in the light of set- 
ting suns or gliding spirit-like across the golden 



316 Phil P. Neely's Sermons. 

sheens of western waves; when I think of it as 
filled with these aspirations for the beautiful and 
the holy, and as borne on by these marvelous ac- 
tivities above the material and even beyond — far, 
far beyond the "milky baldric of the skies" — to the 
higher communion of angels and God, I feel that it 
is an infinitude of itself, and am led to regard it with 
a reverence only less than the profound awe with 
which I look up to God. This is the reverence and 
faith, the purpose and hope, on which every true 
Mason builds his labor of love; and under this 
hopeful view of his fellow-man he toils. This is 
the estimate which, in our sacred retreats of broth- 
erly love, we learn to place on man; and the great 
end of our work as laid down in our charts, and as 
taught by our symbols and in our ceremonies, is to 
give and receive aid in our efforts to bring human 
nature up to its utmost possibilities. 

Beginning with faith in God, we are to aspire 
after truth and goodness, circumscribing our de- 
sires and restraining our passions, and keeping in 
constant exercise charity toward all men. Under 
the remembrance of our own frailties, we are to 
deal gently and kindly with the erring, bearing 
with one another even as we hope to be forgiven. 
We are to love our brother even in his sinfulness, 
to seek him in his waywardness, to restore him in 
his wanderings, and above all to be true and faith- 
ful to him in his adversity. 

brethren, ours is a glorious temple. Its base 
is the earth, its covering the skies, and its altar the 
human heart. The communion we share knows 



Masonic Address. 317 

nothing of geographical or sectarian boundaries. It 
reaches out over the walls of nations, it stretches 
across seas, it penetrates all creeds and forms of 
government; it speaks a language which the Hin- 
doo and the Moor, the Persian and the Greek, the 
African and the Tartar, the European and the 
American, can understand, and which can be heard 
and recognized and heeded amid the roar of battle 
and the carnage of war. 

The past of Masonry has been as useful as her 
future to-day is hopeful. Storms have swept her 
summit and convulsions have rocked her founda- 
tions, yet she has survived every tempest, and 
stands to-day on a broader basis and lighted with 
a richer splendor than ever. Behold her rising as 
some vision of beauty in the days of Solomon, and 
like a mighty enchantress collecting the marble, 
the cedar, and the cypress, and rearing silently the 
temple of God. 

No workman's steel, no ponderous axes rang, 
Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprang. 

Throughout Egypt and Greece and Asia Minor her 
monuments were seen towering toward heaven, and 
soon the civilized world was filled with her wonders. 
Behold her afterward, an exile from the land of her 
birth, mourning over her falling temples as they 
crumbled beneath the iron heel of the oppressor, 
her lights faintly glimmering along the shores of 
the Tyrrhenian and ^Egean seas. A little later, 
and we see her fettered and manacled and a prisoner 
at Rome. We weep for her there on the Tiber, but 
as we weep she emerges from her thralldom and is 



318 Phil. P. Neelys Sermons. 

seen standing amid mart} 7 rs' flames proudly proclaim- 
ing the triumph of her principles; and then, again, 
when her lights and jewels were growing dim from 
persecution, the Crusaders found her, and robing her 
in royal vestments, they led her forth to rescue the 
holy sepulcher from the hands of the intidel. Since 
then, she has sometimes, like the dove from the ark, 
hovered over an ocean-world of tumult and storm, 
with scarce a place whereon to rest her feet, and 
sometimes, like that dove, has been seen bearing 
the olive-branch to individuals and nations who 
were at enmity and engaged in strife. She has 
known the gloom of dungeons, she has heard the 
roar of faggot and flame, she has felt the torture of 
the rack; yet, she still lives, and to-day, like the 
monarch bird of heaven, her wing is upon the wind 
and her eye upon the sun — the clouds vanishing be- 
neath and the heavens all radiant above. We too, 
dear brethren, meet to-day with sad memories of 
a stormy past. Since you last came together the 
tempest has been abroad, and your tattered canvas 
and torn sails tell of rough seas and of dangers 
passed. Thank God that they are passed, and that 
here, in this green isle of brotherly love, this calm 
retreat of Masonic fellowship, we have come to-day 
to moor our barks and gather fresh courage for the 
journey before us! You may have done much, but 
there is still much to do — much for yourselves and 
much for others. Esteem nothing done until all is 
accomplished — your own personal and individual 
purification, and the happiness of widowhood and 
orphanage, whose hope, next to God, is in you. I 



Masonic Address. 319 

beg leave to repeat to you, by way of illustration 
and encouragement, Leigh Hunt's beautiful alle- 
gorical vision: 

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) 
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, 
And saw within the moonlight in his room, 
Making it rich and like a lily all in bloom, 
An angel writing in a book of gold. 
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, 
And to the presence in his room he said, 

" What writest thou ?" The vision raised its head, 
And with a look made all of sweet accord 
Answered, " The names of those who love the Lord." 

"And is mine one ? " said Adhem. " Xay, not so," 
Eeplied the angel. Abou spoke more low, 
But cheerily still, and said : " I pray thee, then, 
Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." 
The angel wrote and vanished. The next night 
It came again, with a great wakening light, 
And showed the names whom love of God had blest; 
And lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest ! 

So mote it be with me and you, and with all 
worthy and accepted Masons ! 



The End. 



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